Tag: sustainable energy

AI finds a cheaper way to make green hydrogen

AI finds a cheaper way to make green hydrogen

Researchers at the University of Toronto are using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific breakthroughs in the search for sustainable energy. They used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) to confirm that an AI-generated “recipe” for a new catalyst offered a more efficient way to make hydrogen fuel.   

To create green hydrogen, you pass electricity that’s been generated from renewable resources between two pieces of metal in water. This causes oxygen and hydrogen gases to be released. The problem with this process is that it currently requires a lot of electricity and the metals used are rare and expensive.

“We’re talking about hundreds of millions or billions of alloy candidates, and one of them could be the right answer,” said Jehad Abed. He was part of a team that developed a computer program to significantly speed up this search. Their findings were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. At the time of this project, Abed was a PhD student under the supervision of Edward Sargent at the University of Toronto working alongside scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.  

Researchers are searching for the right alloy, or combination of metals, that would act as a catalyst to make this reaction more efficient and affordable. Traditionally, this search would involve trial and error in the lab, but when you are trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, this approach takes too much time.

The AI program the team developed took over 36,000 different metal oxide combinations and ran virtual simulations to assess which combination of ingredients might work the best. Abed then tested the program’s top candidate in the lab to see if its predictions were accurate.

The team used the CLS’s ultra-bright X-rays to analyze the catalyst’s performance during a reaction. “What we needed to do is use that very bright light at the Canadian Light Source to shine it on our material and see how the atomic arrangements would change and respond to the amount of electricity that we put in,” said Abed. The researchers also used the Advanced Photon Source at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

Read more on CLS website

New SLAC-Stanford Battery Center targets roadblocks to a sustainable energy transition

New SLAC-Stanford Battery Center targets roadblocks to a sustainable energy transition

The center at SLAC aims to bridge the gaps between discovering, manufacturing and deploying innovative energy storage solutions. 

The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University today announced the launch of a new joint battery center at SLAC. It will bring together the resources and expertise of the national lab, the university and Silicon Valley to accelerate the deployment of batteries and other energy storage solutions as part of the energy transition that’s essential for addressing climate change.

A key part of this transition will be to decarbonize the world’s transportation systems and electric grids ­– to power them without fossil fuels. To do so, society will need to develop the capacity to store several hundred terawatt-hours of sustainably generated energy. Only about 1% of that capacity is in place today.

Filling the enormous gap between what we have and what we need is one of the biggest challenges in energy research and development. It will require that experts in chemistry, materials science, engineering and a host of other fields join forces to make batteries safer, more efficient and less costly and manufacture them more sustainably from earth-abundant materials, all on a global scale. 

The SLAC-Stanford Battery Center will address that challenge. It will serve as the nexus for battery research at the lab and the university, bringing together large numbers of faculty, staff scientists, students and postdoctoral researchers from SLAC and Stanford for research, education and workforce training. 

 “We’re excited to launch this center and to work with our partners on tackling one of today’s most pressing global issues,” said interim SLAC Director Stephen Streiffer. “The center will leverage the combined strengths of Stanford and SLAC, including experts and industry partners from a wide variety of disciplines, and provide access to the lab’s world-class scientific facilities. All of these are important to move novel energy storage technologies out of the lab and into widespread use.”

Expert research with unique tools

Research and development at the center will span a vast range of systems – from understanding chemical reactions that store energy in electrodes to designing battery materials at the nanoscale, making and testing devices, improving manufacturing processes and finding ways to scale up those processes so they can become part of everyday life. 

“It’s not enough to make a game-changing battery material in small amounts,” said Jagjit Nanda, a SLAC distinguished scientist, Stanford adjunct professor and executive director of the new center, whose background includes decades of battery research at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We have to understand the manufacturing science needed to make it in larger quantities on a massive scale without compromising on performance.”

Longstanding collaborations between SLAC and Stanford researchers have already produced many important insights into how batteries work and how to make them smaller, lighter, safer and more powerful. These studies have used machine learning to quickly identify the most promising battery materials from hundreds made in the lab, and measured the properties of those materials and the nanoscale details of battery operation at the lab’s synchrotron X-ray facility. SLAC’s X-ray free-electron laser is available, as well, for fundamental studies of energy-related materials and processes. 

SLAC and Stanford also pioneered the use of cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique developed to image biology in atomic detail, to get the first clear look at finger-like growths that can degrade lithium-ion batteries and set them on fire. This technique has also been used to probe squishy layers that build up on electrodes and must be carefully managed, in research performed at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES).

Nanda said the center will also focus on making energy storage more sustainable, for instance by choosing materials that are abundant, easy to recycle and can be extracted in a way that’s less costly and produces fewer emissions.

Read more on the SLAC website