Léonard Boussioux
Operations Research Center, MIT
Keywords: Climate Policy Global Scale, Smart Cities, Weatherization & Climate Adaptation
Multimodality: the Next Frontier of Artificial Intelligence
The recent large-scale availability of massive spatial-temporal data from satellite imagery is an unprecedented opportunity to support new approaches to natural disaster management, urban design, ecological conservation, understanding climate change, or precise agriculture. Artificial intelligence provides numerous architectures to leverage multimodal data, but many studies lack the crucial aspects of usability, replicability, and user trust. On the other hand, operations research practitioners emphasize real-world implementation but do not necessarily possess the tools to leverage and combine high-dimensional, messy, and unstructured data. Therefore, we propose a data-driven 3-step mechanism - Gather, Extract, Predict - to bridge the gap and translate the best machine learning and deep learning tools into efficient systems satisfying industrial and organizational needs. We showcase multimodality applications in tropical cyclone forecasting, pollution management, and ecosystem conservation using novel feature extraction techniques. We hope to open the door to further use of our tools for predictive and prescriptive analytics.
Vassilis Digalakis
MIT
Keywords: Renewable Energy, Industrial decarbonization
Decarbonizing OCP
We present our collaboration with OCP, one of the world's largest producers of phosphate and phosphate-based products, in support of a green initiative designed to significantly reduce the company's greenhouse gas emissions. We study the problem of decarbonizing OCP's electricity supply by installing a mixture of solar panels and batteries to minimize their time-discounted investment cost plus the cost of satisfying their remaining demand via the national grid. We adopt a data-driven robust optimization approach which averages across uncertainty sets constructed from historical solar capacity factors and prevents overfitting through distributional robustness. The proposed methodology reduces by over 60% the emissions which arise from OCP's energy needs while lowering their time-adjusted operational costs by 1.7 billion USD more than their 1 billion USD investment.
Pablo Dean
MIT
Keywords: Carbon Removal (carbon-to-value)
Competition-enhanced mixed-gas transport in amine-functionalized microporous polymer membranes
Chemical separations account for roughly half of the United States’ industrial energy consumption, 49% of which is attributed to distillation alone. Membrane-based separation systems are an environmentally friendly alternative to energy-intensive separation processes. Polymer
membranes are particularly promising for gas separations due to their processability, mechanical strength, and reproducibility. Despite their advantages, however, polymer membranes only represent a small percentage of the separations market due to an “upper-bound” tradeoff in permeability (throughput) and selectivity (separation efficiency). Recently, polymer membranes with permanent porosity (termed “microporous”) have pushed the limits of this upper bound due
to their increased permeability as well as their ability to separate gases based on minuscule size differences (diffusion selectivity).
Performing separations based primarily on size can become exceedingly difficult, as certain gas mixtures contain molecules that differ in kinetic diameter by less than a tenth of a nanometer. Instead, recent advancements in microporous polymers have indicated that a phenomenon known as competitive sorption can be used to enhance separation performance by leveraging gas-polymer interactions instead of differences in gas diffusivity. Specifically, this work focuses on the effects of amine functionalization on CO2- and H2S-selective gas transport in microporous polymer materials, including PIM-1 and an emerging family of polymers known as poly-aryl ethers (PAEs). Sorption experiments show that these acid gases exhibit higher affinity for the basic amine moiety, resulting in higher uptake in amine-functionalized materials relative to their unfunctionalized counterparts. Additionally, the effects of competitive sorption are investigated through mixed-gas permeation experiments, where ternary (CO2/CH4/H2S) and binary (CO2/CH4) tests show that both CO2 and H2S outcompete the less
condensable CH4, resulting in higher mixed-gas selectivity relative to pure-gas selectivity. To further investigate the impact of differences in gas condensability on competition, hydrocarbon-based mixtures are also studied in these materials. This work aims to provide an understanding of competition in microporous polymer membranes that can be utilized in the design and evaluation of future membrane synthetic approaches.
Landon Schofield
MIT Energy Initiative
Keywords: Hydrogen
Modeling the impact of dynamic operation on the cost of low-temperature electrolytic hydrogen production
In this study we develop a dynamic model of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer system and use it to evaluate the cost-optimal design and operation of the system when exposed to time-varying attributes of electricity supply. The question of dynamic operation is motivated by the prior literature work showing that cost-effective production of hydrogen via electrolyzer must contend with time-varying attributes of electricity supply from the grid or co-located renewable energy, which could necessitate dynamic operation. This partial load operation not only has implications for capital utilization, which has been extensively studied, but also stack lifetime and operating efficiencies that are less well studied. Here, we developed a dynamic optimization model for the PEM electrolysis system that considers: a) a first-principles electrochemical model to characterize cell operation at a range of current densities and pressure conditions that is benchmarked on state-of-art PEM systems, b) coupled heat and material balances for the cell and balance of plant following typical systems being deployed today and c) operational constraints related to safe operation. The model enables characterizing cost-optimal temporal dynamics of production rates, but also other key process variables, such as temperature fluctuations and species concentrations at the anode/cathode which are essential for safe operation due to hydrogen gas crossover. The developed dynamic optimization model is used to identify operational routines and design considerations that minimize the levelized cost of hydrogen production considering time-varying electricity prices as well as other operational constraints.
Dr. Gal Ringel
MIT
Keywords: Carbon Markets, Hydrogen, Carbon Removal (carbon-to-value), Smart Cities, Carbon composites, new building paradigm, high-performance, prototyping, energy footprint
CarbonHouse
Predictions of a global doubling of buildings and infrastructure by 2050 present an intractable material supply and processing problem. Many current materials used in buildings are highly energy-intensive. Fossil fuels provide the energy to mine, transport, and manufacture these earth-surface minerals and metals into heavy, multi-material, many-jointed building envelopes. The energy consumption of buildings and consequent pollution demand a new material paradigm.
Objectives: The CarbonHouse project, funded by ARPA-e, seeks to validate that carbon derived from methane pyrolysis can be used as structural and non-structural building materials. Carbon composites already offer an alternative material paradigm for large, lightweight, high-performance structural uses such as boats and aircraft. This project aims to demonstrate an ultra-low life cycle energy and CO2 footprint for building envelopes and all functional elements at a commercially feasible life cycle cost of ownership. Through material-processing exploration, prototyping building elements for fire, structure, thermal, and acoustics, and fabricating pilot building envelopes, this project looks to use hydrocarbon-derived composites (especially CNT/ Cfoam) to create minimal-footprint habitation. The project will demonstrate the benefit of using carbon as a building material and architectural concept, replacing a significant fraction of minerals and metals for building structures and also for thermal and electrical systems.
Joe Maser, Anurag Goel
enVerid
Keywords: Electrification Policy, Carbon Removal (carbon-to-value), Smart Cities, Heating & Air Conditioning (HVAC)
Sorbent Ventilation Technology - Sustainable Indoor Air Quality
Adsorbent CO2 scrubbing technology, and how it applies to commercial buildings to reduce Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning energy consumption and improving indoor air quality
Camilo Mora, Josué Velázquez
MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics
Keywords: Transportation, Smart Cities
Decarbonizing urban logistics with EZ Parking
The poster presents the results of EZ Parking, an applied research project conducted to decarbonize urban logistics associated with the lack of parking spaces for freight vehicles.
Sayandeep Biswas
MIT
Keywords: Renewable Energy, Hydrogen, EV & Fuel Cell
Electrochemical Fuel Ionic Liquids - New class of energy carriers
Studying the potential of Electrochemical Fuel Ionic Liquids (EFILs) as energy carriers. These include compounds that can be electrochemically broken to release hydrogen. This project explored ammonium formate, one of many potential EFILs, and studied the decomposition kinetics in detail which include both temperature, voltage, and catalyst studies.
Sanjana Paul, Nikita Klimenko, Carmen Sleight Crawford
MIT Senseable City Lab, MIT Senseable City Lab, MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering
Keywords: Grid (Modernization), Nuclear
Nuclear Batteries: Mobile, Modular, Carbon-Free Energy
CANES and MIT's Senseable City Lab will present an overview of the nuclear batteries project, focusing on envisioning how nuclear battery-powered nano and micro grids can enable a more distirbuted, democratized, and secure energy system, and the potential for delivering the increased socioeconomical, health, and environmental resilience all corners of the world are in need of.
Dr. Junghyo Yoon, Bruce Crawford
MIT (RLE, Sloan)
Keywords: Water Technology
Portable Desalination using Ion Concentration Polarization (ICP)
The poster will give a description of ICP technology- how it works, and how it was developed. It will also touch on the commercialization goals of the team, and outline short-term plans.
Latifa Alkhayat, Ous Abou Ras, Angela Montal
MIT
Keywords: Waste Management, Smart Cities
Harness the Heat
Across major urban centers like New York City, there are incredible inefficiencies and environmental hazards related to heat escape from infrastructure, buildings and utilities. The most visible of which are the ubiquitous orange cones set up across Manhattan streets funneling steam from over 100 miles of district heating pipes lying below the city streets. On average, a fully emitting steam cone has a temperature of 80100°C and emits as much heat as 50 electric heaters per day (working at 1500 Watts).
Harness the Heat identifies, collects and utilizes wasted heat to provide more comfortable and liveable outdoor public spaces.
Harness the Heat is a venture under the DesignX, the MIT School of Architecture and Planning venture accelerator program.
Paul Seurin
MIT
Keywords: Hydrogen
H2 Golden Retriever: Methodology and Tool for Evidence-based research grantsmanship
Hydrogen is poised to play a major role in decarbonizing the economy. As the H2 research grows, the Department of Energy is faced with the burden of rapid absorption of new information on hydrogen and using that new knowledge to make funding decisions towards reaching the Hydrogen "1 1 1" goal. To aid the DOE in this ambitious task, they need intelligent tools that inform them as they make evidence-based research funding decisions. This work developed the H2 Golden Retriever (H2GR) system for H2 knowledge discovery and representation.
Shardul Sreekumar, Yaqoot Shaharyar
Clean Crop Technologies, Inc.
Keywords: Water Technology, Weatherization & Climate Adaptation
Sustainable seed decontamination and vigor enhancement using cold plasma to address global agricultural supply chain challenges
Clean Crop Technologies implements its proprietary atmospheric pressure high voltage cold plasma technology to enhance seed vigor and offer a sustainable alternative to chemical based large scale seed decontamination strategies. Conventional modes of seed decontamination and priming include the use of chemicals like pesticides, nematicides etc. which are environmentally unsustainable and eventually find their way into the water table as well as the food we eat. CCT's cold plasma technology uses high voltage to generate non equilibrium plasma (room temperature plasma) to generate reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species that can effectively and safely decontaminate seeds without leaving any residue on the seed surface. Moreover, using cold plasma technology, seed surfaces are optimized to enhance water uptake that increases early stage vigor leading to higher yields and more uniformity.
Sarah Demsky
MIT Lab for Aviation and the Environment
Keywords: Carbon Markets (Compliance & Voluntary), Transportation
Potential for biofuels to lower US aviation GHG emissions in 2035
The FAA has set goals in the near term to lower aviation’s carbon footprint using sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). This research builds a national scale supply chain system for aviation biofuels, and calculates the lifecycle cost and emissions associated with meeting 50% of jet fuel demand from biofuels in 2035. The optimization model reallocates farmland and distributes how much of which biofuels are produced where to minimize cost, both with and without an added carbon price. This research shows the potential carbon reduction that biofuels can offer aviation in 2035 in different future scenarios.
Jun Wen Law
MIT Energy Initiative
Keywords: Electrification Policy, Renewable Energy, Hydrogen, Carbon Removal (carbon-to-value)
Effects of Negative Emissions Technologies in a Net-Zero Integrated Energy System
Integrated assessment of energy systems is crucial for identifying cost-effective, resilient and equitable decarbonization pathways that account for various spatial, temporal and technological interactions. While electrification is a key element of decarbonization strategies, the practical challenges associated with electrification of certain end-uses (e.g. aviation, shipping, industry) as well as intermittency of variable renewable energy sources creates opportunities for range of other vectors and technologies to achieve a net-zero emissions goal. These include utilization of alternative fuels such as hydrogen produced from multiple sources, as well as negative emission technologies (NETs) such as direct air capture (DAC) and bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS). This study investigates the effect of optimizing an integrated energy system comprising of the power, hydrogen, carbon, and bioenergy supply chains to fulfill US energy demands in 2050. Our approach relies on using a mixed integer programming model that includes spatial and temporal variations in resources, hourly supply and demand balances for each energy vector, as well as technology operational and cost characterization, to evaluate the least-cost investment and operation of energy infrastructure for various scenarios. Preliminary assessment of the model across scenarios utilizing various combinations of NETs would be presented to show the extent of interactions between each sector and the effect on technology deployment and cost to achieve systemwide net-zero CO2 emissions.
Zach Berzolla, Sam Wolk
MIT Sustainable Design Lab
Keywords: Climate Policy Local Scale, Smart Cities
Modeling Cities' Emissions Reduction Potential in the Build Environment
This poster presents a freely available web tool (UBEM.io) developed by the MIT Sustainable Design Lab to help city's develop a model (oftentimes called digital twin) for their entire building stock. This model can be used to test different retrofit strategies in the building stock to help policymakers refine the best strategies to meet their greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. This tool has been tested with 20 cities in 11 different countries and are hoping to continue to grow its use.
Taylor Tracy, David Carpenter
MIT Nuclear Reactor Lab
Keywords: Nuclear
Supercharging Molten Salt Reactor Development
One of the 6MW MIT Research Reactor uses is to develop next-generation nuclear power reactors. This poster will show the different ways the MIT reactor and its facilities are being utilized for developing molten salt reactors, which are inherently safe and can be deployed off of the grid with low staffing requirements, making it a dependable zero emission source of energy.
Aniket Patankar
MIT
Keywords: Renewable Energy, Hydrogen
A thermochemical approach to producing low-cost green hydrogen from off-peak wind and solar electricity
With the rapid proliferation of Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) sources into the grid, it is expected that there will be a few hours of the day when wholesale electricity prices are significantly lower than average. It is attractive to use such electricity to produce green hydrogen and other low-emission fuels. We contend that direct electrochemical conversion of electricity to hydrogen (including low-temperature and high-temperature electrolysis) is not ideally suited to take advantage of short periods of low electricity prices. This is because of the high cost of electrolyzer capex when operated at low capacity factor, and the high cost of cost of storing electricity. We propose instead a thermochemical redox cycle that uses high-temperature heat directly to split water. By storing VRE electricity as heat at low cost, our system runs exclusively on low-priced electricity and produces hydrogen continuously. Our novel ‘Reactor Train System’ is more than five times as efficient as today’s state-of-the-art thermochemical systems owing to internal heat recovery and efficient oxygen removal.
Alvin Tian
Harvard / MIT
Keywords: Carbon Markets (Compliance & Voluntary)
BlockCarbon - a technology platform to accelerate and internationalize China’s efforts to achieve carbon net-zero
Our start-up BlockCarbon is building a remote sensing + AI technology driven platform and a marketplace. The platform uses deep learning algorithm to generate critical information and insights from a variety of data sources including satellite image, near-earth aerial data, and other asset-based sensors, helping China-based carbon credit project developers to identify and verify to-be-developed targets, predict the carbon storage volume, monitor the developed projects, and sell the credits in the international markets.
Kevin Chen
Harvard
Keywords: Renewable Energy, Storage & Batteries
Deployment of Battery Energy Storage System for Energy Arbitrage Applications
Modern electric power system is gradually evolvinginto a different grid, which is expected to be more reliable and efficient with two-way flow of information and electricity between demand and supply. Energy storage system (ESS) is one of the most promising ideas to achieve this concept. It can provide a variety of applications from generation and transmission system to distribution and end-user side. Upward trending of electric vehicle (EV) also has effect on the residential and commercial load. This paper focuses on solving an independent optimization problem, maximizing energy arbitrage revenue. An investor company installs a BESS of specific ratings (defined by the MW and maximum hour of operation) and economic evaluation of different BESS sizes are performed, including leverage investment analysis and net present value calculation.
Kariana Moreno
MIT
Keywords: Hydrogen, EV & Fuel Cell
Powertrain & System for LOHC-powered long-haul trucking
We propose changing the current hydrogen distribution model to address its pain points by designing a novel powertrain for trucks to enable onboard LOHC de-hydrogenation. The merit of this idea resides in the opportunity for waste heat recovery using the engine exhaust, which will improve overall system efficiency. Furthermore, gas stations will only need to handle liquids, as they already do, making the switch from traditional fossil fuels to LOHCs much easier.
Maria Aguiar, Lucy Young
MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team Enterprise
Keywords: Renewable Energy, EV & Fuel Cell
MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team
This poster presentation will provide information on the team, the cars they have built, and the races they have gone to.
Young Ko
MIT, Mechanical Engineering
Keywords: Electrification Policy, Smart Cities, Weatherization & Climate Adaptation
Scalable and affordable food cooler based on hybrid evaporative-radiative cooling architecture with tunable cooling performance
Temperature regulation is critical for food storage, in which food shelf-life increases 2-3 times for every 10 ℃ temperature reduction. However, active cooling solutions such as air conditioning and refrigeration are challenging in many developing countries due to the lack of access to regular electricity. In fact, improper temperature regulation of postharvest food caused more than 37% of food loss in South and Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa in 2009. Here, I present a hybrid food cooler that achieves synergy between evaporative and radiative cooling. Our simple and scalable three-layer cooling architecture can deliver high cooling performance with low-cost materials and reduced water consumption. A solar reflector, an IR-emitting evaporation layer, and a solar-reflective and IR-transparent porous insulation layer comprise three functional layers. Using polymer membranes and the hydrogel, our cooling architecture provides passive cooling with low cost and great scalability. Furthermore, the air gap between the polymer membrane and the hydrogel enables flexibility to tailor the cooling performance to users’ needs. We fabricated a proof-of-concept hybrid food cooler and compared various polymer membranes. We demonstrated a sub-ambient cooling for all tested polymer membranes in outdoor experiments under direct sunlight. We also optimized the cooling performance by tuning the air gap thickness, obtaining cooling power higher than 100W/m^2 or extending the cooling lifetime longer than 5 hours. Our heat and mass transfer model agreed well with the experimental results in simulated cooling performance. Using the model, we anticipate that our hybrid food cooler can increase the food-shelf life in hot-humid regions by ~130%, where radiative or evaporative cooling technologies perform poorly by themselves. Given its concise structure, tunable cooling performance, low-cost materials, and applicability to a wide range of climate conditions, we propose to disseminate our hybrid food cooler to farmers, businesses, and households in developing countries.
Christina Last
Environmental Reporting Collective
Keywords: Energy/Climate & Geopolitics
What Gas Refineries, Satellite Technology and Iraq can Tell us About Air Pollution?
The Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Natural Resources issued a directive in July 2021, giving field operators 18 months to halt the flaring of associated gas. Our findings project flaring will increase, not decrease, relative to 2021 — in violation of the commitment made by the KRG. This talk will demonstrate how, using open source satellite imagery we build a pipeline to identify flaring hotspots, tracks the level of flaring activity through time, as well as measure the number of people impacted by the harmful gases produced during flaring.
Joanne Im
MIT Sloan
Keywords: Climate Policy, Local Scale
Alison Rogers Cove, Phil Cloutier
USEFULL
Keywords: Waste Management, Smart Cities
Ella Richards, Lucy Kitch-Peck
Via Separations
Keywords: Industrial Decarbonization
Franz Hochstrasser
New Haven Community Solar
Keywords: Climate & Energy Justice
Vineet J Nair, Thomas Lee
MIT Mechanical Engineering, MIT Institute for Data, Systems, & Society
Keywords: Electrification Policy, Grid (Modernization), Electricity Market Policy, Renewable Energy, Weatherization & Climate Adaptation
Bahruz Mammadov
BERKM inc
Keywords: Climate Policy Global Scale, Reduction in plastic consumption and food&beverage waste
Tonio Buonassisi, Aleks Siemenn, Eunice Aissi, Fang Sheng, Jim Serdy
MIT
Keywords: Renewable Energy, Storage & Batteries, Hydrogen, Nuclear, Transportation, Water Technology
Rabab Haider
MIT
Keywords: Grid (Modernization), Electricity Market Policy
Andres Bisono Leon
MIT
Keywords: Climate Policy Local Scale, Climate Policy Global Scale, Carbon Markets (Compliance & Voluntary), Energy/Climate & Geopolitics, Carbon Removal (carbon-to-value), Water Technology, Waste Management, Weatherization & Climate Adaptation
Jan-Georg Rosenboom, Stwart Pena Feliz, Kevin Zhang, Dhruv Pillai
MIT
Keywords: Climate & Energy Justice, Waste Management
Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez, Aaron Gould
Osmoses
Keywords: Energy/Climate & Geopolitics, Hydrogen, Carbon Removal (carbon-to-value)
Jack Fletcher
MIT
Keywords: Grid (Modernization), Nuclear
Stephen Lee
MIT Energy Initiative
Keywords: Climate Policy Local Scale, Climate Policy Global Scale, Climate & Energy Justice, Electrification Policy, Energy/Climate & Geopolitics, Grid (Modernization), Renewable Energy, Storage & Batteries, Weatherization & Climate Adaptation
Sam Baghestani
MIT / SHIFT Tools for Sustainability
Keywords: Climate software
Real and Financial Implications of Public Sales of High Greenhouse Gas Emitting Assets
It is an empirical question then whether and when sales by publicly traded firms to private firms harm the environment by shifting assets to users that operate them in more environmentally harmful ways. This paper undertakes an evaluation of these issues in the context of the U.S. fossil-fuel power plant sector and greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, I study plants that were sold by publicly traded firms and estimate changes in the frequency and intensity of plant emissions two years following sale completion. I then estimate the impact of these sales on the market valuation of the seller. I focus on the fossil-fuel power plant sector because of its aggregate importance to U.S. emissions: in 2020, the fossil-fuel generated electricity sector generated 24% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions emissions and the availability of granular, high frequency and high quality production and emissions data.
USEFULL, a tech-enabled circular solution
Plastic-free, zero-waste solution for takeout food and drink.
Industrial Decarbonization using Membranes
Via Separations is a start-up focused on reducing industrial carbon emissions. Over 12% of US energy consumption is spent on inefficient separation processes that can be replaced by membranes. Via has manufactured the world’s first spiral wound graphene oxide membranes, built to withstand the harsh conditions of industrial separations previously inaccessible to other commercial membranes. We are currently developing commercial systems for use in the pulp and paper industry, specifically black liquor concentration, a process which accounts for 1.1% of all US energy consumption due to the high energy demand of evaporation. The introduction of membrane systems will reduce energy consumption by 90% per gallon of water produced. We have successfully collected over 8 months of field data at 3 different paper mills that met or exceeded customer requirements.
Increasing access for nonprofit solar with crowdfunded investment
New Haven Community Solar was the first securities offering accessible to the public to invest in a solar project for a non-profit, Columbus House, serving the unhoused in Connecticut. The project offers 10-15% discounts while providing investors with occasional dividends. There are investors down the street and across the country, individuals and organizations, putting in $100 to $15,000 towards the project via Regulation Crowfunding. The model required innovating corporate structures, legal documents, security types, and financial models. The project is designed to be replicable and templatized so similar organizations can deploy solar and access the savings and offer local investors the wealth generation potential of this alternative asset class.
Impacts of Dynamic Line Ratings on Transmission Systems
Grid regulators and participants are paying increasing attention to Dynamic Line Ratings (DLR) as a new approach to address transmission system bottlenecks. In this work, a thorough comparison of DLR, Ambient Adjusted Ratings (AAR), and the traditional Static Line Ratings (SLR) are conducted on a synthetic Texas ERCOT grid. Estimates of DLR and AAR are calculated using an equation based on heat balance physics, along with high-resolution weather data of temperature and wind velocities. A constraint generation method for contingency screening is developed for solving security-constrained optimal power flow. Numerical results suggest that employing DLR could double the benefits compared to those of AAR relative to SLR, in terms of system costs, renewable curtailment, and emissions.
Lighter PET packaging that provides longer product shelf-life
Using less plastic per packaging and the shelf life extension of a product are among the biggest challenges of the packaging industry. BERKM tackles these problems by reducing the amount of plastic used per packaging by 20% and also by extending product shelf life by 6X. Moreover, technology also enables the elimination of multilayer coatings, enables new product lines, and also improves its recyclability. Enabling innovation is natural clay-based technology that improves several key material properties like gas barrier by 29X, strength by 66%, heat distortion by 37%, and UV resistance by 52X. The main focus is PET but the technology also can be applied to PP and PE.
Accelerating Energy Materials Research using High-throughput Inkjet Deposition and Machine Learning
At the Accelerated Materials Laboratory for Sustainability, we have designed a high-throughput materials synthesis tool capable of studying thousands of unique energy material experiments at rates 1000x faster than conventional material synthesis methods, such as spin coating. The energy materials studied using this tool include lead halide perovskites for solar applications and metal nanoparticles for light-weight, energy efficient transportation applications. By leveraging the mechanics of Rayleigh instability, we accurately control the mixing and deposition of material precursors to achieve experimentation rates of over 1000 unique compositional experiments per minute. Furthermore, integration of online machine learning guides material exploration of vast and multidimensional material phase spaces, such that discovering highly-optimized materials becomes tractable without a priori domain knowledge of the phase space. Thus, enabling faster and more efficient optimization of functional materials. During this presentation, we would like to show a tabletop demo of this tool using food-safe dyes to illustrate the compositional exploration of the tool via optical analysis. Additionally, we will show samples of perovskites and nanoparticles synthesized using this high-throughput tool and compare their XRD and Hyperspectral profiles to analogous materials synthesized using conventional methods.
Flattening the Duck Curve
The large penetration of renewable resources has resulted in rapidly changing net loads, resulting in the characteristic "duck curve". The resulting ramping requirements of bulk system resources is an operational challenge, already seen by California. Rather than relying on expensive storage and carbon emitting gas turbines, I propose a framework within which distributed resources located in the distribution grid are coordinated to provide support to the bulk system. The framework is evaluated on a case study of San Francisco, California, using a standard IEEE test network and under a high penetration of solar PV, flexible loads, and battery units. The proposed distributed approach reduced the ramping requirements of bulk system generators by up to 23%.
Transforming the sargassum seaweed invasions environmental crisis into value chains
Sargassum Ocean Sequestration of Carbon, Inc. (SOS Carbon) is a spinoff company from the Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). SOS Carbon is focused on scaling its unique patented technologies and systems to turn the sargassum invasion problem into an economical, carbon dioxide sink. The company’s current approach centers on developing technologies that efficiently collect Sargassum directly from the sea and dispose of it in a natural and safe way. One of SOS Carbon’s technologies, the Littoral Collection Module (LCM), is a net-based system that locals can deploy on their artisanal boats to harvest sargassum. Fisherman who have been put out of work by sargassum, can now fish for sargassum before it makes landfall and become carbon sequestration workers and thus also help to reinvigorate devastated economies. Widespread deployment of SOS Carbon’s Littoral Collection Module (LCM) can be achieved in partnership with the tourism industry and local governments. This first step, harvesting at sea, eliminates the environmental and economic impact from the seaweed invasion to the countries across the Caribbean and USA. Other chains of value are created as formal employment is provided to local fishermen and community. Another key technology is the Sargassum Ocean Sequestration of Carbon (SOS Carbon) system, which pumps the seaweed to a critical depth of 300m after which it keeps sinking on its own. Below 1,000m, gases are trapped in the Ocean effectively sequestering the carbon. A further benefit is that sargassum can also absorb heavy metals in the Ocean that come from burning coal and these too then get sequestered. SOS Carbon has taken a serious problem and turned it in to a great opportunity.
Simoncycle - Upcycling of PET plastic waste
Plastics enable modern life and support sustainability through lightweight cars, food-spoilage avoiding packaging, insulation materials, etc, but are also associated with significant environmental pollution through leakage into rivers and oceans (~8 million tons of plastic per year), as well as production that relies on fossil fuel usage. The underlying reason for environmental plastic pollution is largely our incapability to recycle these materials at high quality and low cost. Molecular recycling offers a new solution to treat plastic waste where current forms of mechanical recycling fall short. However, recent efforts towards pyrolysis, gasification, hydrolysis, methanolysis or glycolysis, have not been commercialized given their high cost and small environmental benefit. We are leveraging our expertise in polymer chemistry, sustainability and translational science to develop a novel process that can take a variety of previously unrecyclable polyester and "upcycle" (from low to high molecular weight) into "virgin-grade" resin. Our target PET market is >$10 B and legislation in Europe and the US is increasing the demand for high quality recycled material that is currently lacking on the market.
Transforming Molecular Separations
Overview of our team and our membrane solutions for our energy efficient separations.
Towards a Compact Nuclear Power Source Benchmark
The Compact Nuclear Power Source (CNPS) was a high-assay low-enriched uranium, tristructural isotropic-fueled, graphite-moderated microreactor built in 1987 at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In its day, critical experiments with a mock-up of the reactor meaningfully advanced the body of nuclear data until its disassembly in 1991. This work aims to develop a benchmark based on the CNPS experiment due to its potential to accelerate the licensing of similar contemporary microreactors. Uncertainties remain, however, in parameters of the reactor as described in literature and implemented in current computational models. The assessment and minimization of these uncertainties is a crucial step towards a benchmark. This work seeks to initiate this process with a survey of available documentation and refinements to CNPS neutronics models.
Open Geospatial Electricity Demand and Access Maps in Africa
We leverage country-level forecasts for scaling building-level electricity demand and electricity access estimates across Africa and design a system for probabilistic disaggregation and downscaling. We employ high spatial resolution satellite imagery, internet connectivity data sets, night-time lights data, building locations data, roads data, inferred grid locations, economic indicators, and weather data, among others. The methods enable explicit uncertainty quantification, enhanced data privacy, and improved human-interpretability. They also enable the calculation of value-of-information (VoI) criteria for different input data types, enabling surveying expenditures to be maximally informative in expectation.
Software tools for Climate Sustainability
SHIFT will use the poster to demonstrate the assembly of digital tools that come together to support organizations on their journey to measuring, goal-setting, executing, and improving.
Mission: To make it easier for leaders at all stages of development to "hardwire" sustainability into their organizations.
Problem:There is no clear roadmap to climate sustainability, and practitioners seeking direction are confronted with a vast, un-moderated sea of tools and information. There are so many types - and competing versions - of sustainability tools available, that simply identifying the best and most suitable ones for an organization is a major barrier to investing in sustainability.
Solution: SHIFT is an online platform that allows you to navigate sustainability tools so you can carve out the path to implementation that suits your organization. But it's not simply a tool aggregator; SHIFT is also a community of practitioners working together to curate the collection of tools based on their own experiences and feedback.
