Energy Frontier Research Centers to Exploit Nanotechnology
The U.S. federal government is investing $777M over the next five years in 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, including two that will be centered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Staff -- PV Society, 5/13/2009
The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) said it will be home to two of the planned 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) that will receive five years of funding from the Department of Energy (DoE). The two LANL centers each will receive $3.8M a year, or $19M each over five years.
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| More than 110 institutions will be participating in the 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers. |
In late April, the White House announced that the DoE’s Office of Science will invest $777M over the next five years in the 46 EFRCs, to be established at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and private firms. More than 110 institutions will be participating in the EFRC research, involving ~700 senior investigators and >1100 postdoctoral associates, graduate students, undergraduate students and technical staff.
Researchers at the EFRCs will explore challenges in solar energy, biofuels, transportation, energy efficiency, electricity storage and transmission, clean coal and carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear energy, the White House said.
At Los Alamos, one center will be led by LANL Fellow Victor Klimov, and will focus on exploiting the physical properties of nanomaterials to more efficiently convert solar energy into electric power. The center will seek to develop materials such as highly efficient solar collectors that could be painted onto a surface to generate electricity. At the center of the research are quantum dots, semiconducting materials with the ability to generate more than one electrical-energy unit per single light unit (photon).
“Engineered nanostructures such as quantum dots have the ability to harvest light more efficiently than silicon,” Klimov said. “Quantum dots and similar nanomaterials show tremendous potential in numerous applications that could make solar energy a more viable alternative energy source.”
The other center, led by LANL Fellow Michael Nastasi, will focus on developing robust materials that could be used in nuclear power facilities. “The goal of this research is to create materials that will withstand the rigors of next-generation nuclear reactors to allow them to function reliably and safely for long periods of time with reduced maintenance,” Nastasi said.
The White House said the EFRCs will consider broad challenges, including:
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Direct conversion of solar energy to electricity and chemical fuels. Learning to direct and control materials and chemical processes at the level of electrons, where the laws of quantum mechanics rule, would pave the way for essentially new quantum control impacting catalysis, photochemistry, molecular biology, and device physics that are the foundational pieces in solar energy conversion.
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Understanding of how biological feedstocks are converted into portable fuels. This entails research in light harvesting, exciton transfer, charge separation, transfer of reductant to carbon dioxide as well as carbon fixation and storage. Other areas include development of new and improved catalytic conversion processes that are far more robust than enzymatic systems for the conversion of plant polymers to fuels.
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A new generation of radiation-tolerant materials and chemical separation processes for fission applications. Key research includes foundational research in chemistry and physics of actinides and their fission products; new generation of actinide separation processes with improved efficiency, selectivity, cost-effectiveness and waste minimization; first-principles design and understanding of materials with improved radiation and corrosion resistance at elevated temperatures; microstructural design and predictive models for mitigating long-time degradation behavior; characterization, theory and computer models for decades-to-centuries performance; and solution and interfacial behavior under extreme radiation flux and elevated temperatures.
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Addressing fundamental knowledge gaps in energy storage. Without effective electrical energy storage, renewable — yet intermittent — sources of energy such as wind and solar will not be able to significantly displace fossil, nuclear and other conventional energy sources used for generating electricity for the power grid.
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Transforming energy utilization and transmission. Understanding the emergent behavior of materials and chemical reactivity at the nanoscale offers remarkable opportunities in a broad arena of applications including solid-state lighting, electrical generators, clean and efficient combustion of 21st century transportation fuels, catalytic processes for efficient production and utilization of chemical fuels, and superconductivity for resistance-less electricity transmission.
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Science-based geological carbon sequestration. Key research areas involve new membranes and separations of carbon dioxide from process streams at high temperature and pressure. Also, the effort will seek to deepen understanding of geochemical processes relevant to the dimensions of subsurface sequestration sites with realistic geological formations chemistry; develop critical geophysical measurement techniques for remote probing and tracking; develop fluid-flow measurement approaches and simulation tools that can link chemical and physical processes at multiple scales; and advanced measurement and modeling verification at field sites.
