From The College of Engineering
At
6.17.24
Lorena Taboas
Professor Chao Luo will study an innovative design concept for energy storage batteries, underscoring the University of Miami’s commitment to clean energy innovation.
While lithium-ion batteries power our cell phones and computers, researchers have long searched for new battery chemistries that offer increased energy and longer lifespans. Creating new materials for these advanced batteries is at the forefront of chemical engineering associate professor Chao Luo’s new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.
The collaborative grant will allow Luo and his research team to design and study organic molecules to better understand how their structures affect the batteries’ performance. The goal is to create new materials for hybrid redox-flow batteries, which have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional lithium-ion batteries and develop next-generation sustainable batteries.
“Compared to the inorganic material-based lithium-ion batteries, these batteries will lower energy consumption and carbon footprint during the battery production, usage, and recycling processes,” said Luo. “Our technology will also avoid the use of rare and toxic heavy metal elements to achieve green and sustainable batteries.”
Real-world applications
The batteries, which use low-cost materials but produce high-power energy, could transform industries from consumer electronics and electric transportation to grid-scale energy storage. In disaster responses, they can help serve as power supplies, ensuring continuous electricity for critical facilities such as schools and hospitals. The batteries can also be coupled with renewable energy sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels. The research will also provide insight into other applications that rely on tunable organic molecules, such as li-ion batteries, CO2 capture, and electrochemical sensing.
Extreme and fast-charging batteries
Luo’s other research projects include developing extreme batteries that can withstand extreme temperatures from as high as 100 degrees Celsius to as low as –60 degrees Celsius. “When you refill your tank, it only takes a few minutes,” said Luo. “But if you drive electric vehicles, it could take maybe a couple of hours to fully recharge your battery. That’s why we are looking to develop fast-charging batteries so electric vehicles can be fully charged within 15 minutes or less.”
Looking toward the future, Luo hopes his research attracts engineering and science students to the field of clean energy. By inspiring the next generation of STEM researchers, he hopes to contribute to a growing workforce dedicated to advancing sustainable energy.
Earlier this year, the College of Engineering launched the Miami Institute for Clean Energy to drive the advancement of clean energy technologies and tackle challenges in sustainable energy production.
See the full article here.
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The College of Engineering is focused on educating the next generation of engineers to prepare societal leaders with strong scientific and technical skills combined with an ethical and moral outlook to impact academia, business, government and/or the non-profit sector. Through discovery of new knowledge and its application we tackle global challenge problems, and create opportunities through innovation and entrepreneurship. We do this with a deep commitment to excellence, demonstrated meritocracy, transparency, inclusiveness, and diversity.
The College of Engineering transforms lives by:
Creating new knowledge
Transmitting knowledge through innovative education for facilitating life-long learning
Translating knowledge through innovation and entrepreneurship, and
Applying knowledge to benefit the community
The University of Miami is a private research university in Coral Gables, Florida. The university enrolls over 19,000 students in 12 separate colleges and schools, including the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine in Miami’s Health District, a law school on the main campus, and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science focused on the study of oceanography and atmospheric sciences on Virginia Key, with research facilities at the Richmond Facility in southern Miami-Dade County.
The university offers 132 undergraduate, 148 master’s, and 67 doctoral degree programs, of which 63 are research/scholarship and 4 are professional areas of study. Over the years, the university’s students have represented all 50 states and close to 150 foreign countries. With more than 16,000 full- and part-time faculty and staff, The University of Miami is a top 10 employer in Miami-Dade County. The University of Miami’s main campus in Coral Gables has 239 acres and over 5.7 million square feet of buildings.
The University of Miami is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The University of Miami annual research expenditures exceed $400 million. The University of Miami offers a large library system with over 3.9 million volumes and exceptional holdings in Cuban heritage and music.
The University of Miami also offers a wide range of student activities, including fraternities and sororities, and hundreds of student organizations. The Miami Hurricane, the student newspaper, and WVUM, the student-run radio station, have won multiple collegiate awards. The University of Miami’s intercollegiate athletic teams, collectively known as the Miami Hurricanes, compete in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The University of Miami’s football team has won national championships since and its baseball team has won national championships.
Research
The University of Miami is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The University of Miami receives over $200 million in annual federal research funding, including over $131 million from the Department of Health and Human Services and $15 million from the National Science Foundation. Of the $8.2 billion appropriated by Congress in 2009 as a part of the stimulus bill for research priorities of The National Institutes of Health, the Miller School received $40.5 million. In addition to research conducted in the individual academic schools and departments, Miami has the following university-wide research centers:
The Center for Computational Science
The Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS)
Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy
The Miami European Union Center: This group is a consortium with Florida International University established in fall 2001 with a grant from the European Commission through its delegation in Washington, D.C., intended to research economic, social, and political issues of interest to the European Union.
The Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies
John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics – studies possible causes of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration.
Center on Research and Education for Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE)
Wallace H. Coulter Center for Translational Research
The Miller School of Medicine receives more than $200 million per year in external grants and contracts to fund 1,500 ongoing projects. The medical campus includes more than 500,000 sq ft (46,000 m^2) of research space and the University of Miami Life Science Park, which has an additional 2,000,000 sq ft (190,000 m^2) of space adjacent to the medical campus. The University of Miami’s Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute seeks to understand the biology of stem cells and translate basic research into new regenerative therapies.
The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science receives over $50 million in annual external research funding. Their laboratories include a salt-water wave tank, a five-tank Conditioning and Spawning System, multi-tank Aplysia Culture Laboratory, Controlled Corals Climate Tanks, and DNA analysis equipment. The campus also houses an invertebrate museum with 400,000 specimens and operates the Bimini Biological Field Station, an array of oceanographic high-frequency radar along the US east coast, and the Bermuda aerosol observatory. The University of Miami also owns the Little Salt Spring, a site on the National Register of Historic Places, in North Port, Florida, where RSMAS performs archaeological and paleontological research.
The University of Miami built a brain imaging annex to the James M. Cox Jr. Science Center within the College of Arts and Sciences. The building includes a human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) laboratory, where scientists, clinicians, and engineers can study fundamental aspects of brain function. Construction of the lab was funded in part by a $14.8 million in stimulus money grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The university receives over $161 million in science and engineering funding from the U.S. federal government, the largest Hispanic-serving recipient and very high overall. $117 million of the funding was through the Department of Health and Human Services and was used largely for the medical campus.
The University of Miami maintains one of the largest centralized academic cyber infrastructures in the country with numerous assets. The Center for Computational Science High Performance Computing group has been in continuous operation since 2007. Over that time the core has grown from a zero HPC cyberinfrastructure to a regional high-performance computing environment that currently supports more than 1,200 users, 220 TFlops of computational power, and more than 3 Petabytes of disk storage.
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