Amid the surge in demand for lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles (EVs), there is a greater need to properly recycle them. The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is working to optimize Georgia’s EV battery supply chain by developing cost- and energy-efficient methods to recover materials from spent batteries so that more of them can be reused – and pose fewer environmental risks.

Georgia is quickly emerging as a hub for the electronic transportation industry. According to data from the Georgia Department of Economic Development, since 2018, 35 EV-related projects have contributed $23 billion in investments in the state.

South Korea-based Hyundai Motor Group recently broke ground on its first fully dedicated EV manufacturing facility in Savannah’s Bryan County. The company has also teamed up with LG Energy Solution to invest $4.3 billion in building an EV battery cell manufacturing plant at the same location.

EV manufacturer and automotive technology company Rivian, which is based on Irvine, Calif., has announced a $5 billion investment in its second U.S. plant located east of Atlanta in Morgan and Walton Counties.

Hyundai’s new facility is expected to reach full production capacity at the end of 2025, with 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy anticipated to support the production of 300,000 EVs. Rivian, meanwhile, anticipates its Georgia plant will employ over 7,500 workers while producing up to 400,000 vehicles each year.

“This level of industry engagement in Georgia is unprecedented,” said Kevin Caravati, a GTRI principal research scientist, who is supporting this project. “The Hyundai plant, for example, could create tens of thousands of jobs in a very rural part of Georgia, which would be a step in the right direction for the entire state.”

The lithium-ion batteries that power EVs are seen as desirable over other battery technologies because of their high energy density, which allows electric cars to travel longer distances on a single charge. These types of batteries also have a low self-discharge rate, which means that the stored energy remains available for an extended period of time even when the vehicle is not in use. 

However, these batteries can easily turn into fire hazards – especially at the end of their life cycle. Very few batteries ever end up being recycled and those that do get recycled are often mishandled.   

“Currently, there are no recycling standards in place, which poses challenges for the entire supply chain,” said Milad Navaei, a GTRI senior research engineer, who is leading this project. “Our goal is to create circular economy for batteries in Georgia where we can reduce our dependence on raw materials that often come from overseas and can be very expensive.”  

Lithium-ion batteries use metals including lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt that are mined in locations such as Africa’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chile and Argentina. During the production process, the metals are combined with other materials to form the two key components of a battery cell – the cathode and the anode. Inside a battery, the cathode, which has a negative charge, and anode, which has a positive charge, interact to generate electrons that power the electronic device. Most lithium-ion batteries are currently made in China.  

Navaei noted that geopolitical sensitivities and lingering supply chain challenges in many of these regions makes GTRI’s work all the more crucial.

GTRI’s research consists of two parts: One, develop more advanced analytics capabilities for fleet management companies to monitor the health and performance of EV batteries, and two, optimize the recovery of raw materials from batteries at the end of their useful life.  

“The battery is the most important part of an EV, and it’s critical to know the battery’s state of health (SoH), which is the ratio of the present capacity to the initial capacity,” said Navaei. “Our goal is to utilize technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor the SoH of these batteries and estimate the life cycle, which heavily depends on the usage and the type of battery for its safe and reliable implementation in the next life application.”

GTRI aims to integrate these technologies into companies’ existing inventory management systems to streamline process management and reporting.

For the second part of the research, GTRI is utilizing a statistical technique known as parametric modeling to aggregate data about known behaviors and characteristics of EV batteries to help companies make more informed decisions about properly depowering them and repurposing their raw materials with minimal environmental impact.

“Developing a robust system-modeling approach to support our energy research is a primary focus of ours,” said GTRI Principal Research Scientist Ilan Stern, who is also supporting the project. “Since our ultimate goal is to utilize domestic sources in our supply chain, really the only way to do that is by building out strong recycling models to account for the fact that these companies are working with finite materials and many of them are coming from conflict zones.”

GTRI is working with a number of industry partners on this project, including many companies that participated in Georgia Tech Battery Day earlier this year. At the event, over 230 energy researchers and industry participants convened to discuss emerging opportunities in energy storage research. Some of the companies represented at the event included Hyundai Kia, Delta Airlines, Cox Automotive and Panasonic.

 

Writer: Anna Akins 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

 

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

 

Future generations of solid-state lithium-ion batteries based on hybrid ceramic-polymer electrolytes could offer the potential for greater energy storage, faster recharging, and higher electrochemical and thermal stability – while overcoming many of the technology challenges associated with earlier solid-state batteries.

At the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), researchers are working to expand their fundamental understanding of these hybrid electrolytes, the component that transfers charge between electrodes as the batteries power systems such as electric vehicles (EVs) – and are then recharged. Lithium-ion batteries widely used in today’s EVs rely on liquid electrolytes, which are susceptible to thermal runaway and fire if they are damaged.

“We’ve shown that we can fabricate these hybrid, solid-state electrolytes and put them into coin cells to demonstrate high performance and high stability,” said Ilan Stern, a principal research scientist who leads battery research at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Georgia Tech’s applied research organization. “We’ve laid the foundation to show that we can develop innovations in solid-state batteries based on these ceramic-polymer hybrids. Our next step is to integrate the technology into pouch cells, the type of batteries used in electric vehicles.”

The GTRI researchers are working with colleagues from Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Strategic Energy Institute on research into an electrolyte known as lithium aluminum germanium phosphate (LAGP). A polymer component known as poly DOL surrounds the LAGP electrolyte, providing internal ionic conductivity that goes well beyond existing ceramic electrolytes – without the disadvantages of flammable liquids. The fabrication team and academic collaboration are led by Jinho Park, a GTRI research scientist. Synthesis of the LAGP ceramic is led by Jason Nadler, a GTRI principal research scientist.

Advantages of Hybrid Ceramic-Polymer Materials

Stern describes traditional ceramic electrolytes as similar to hard candy – think M&Ms – poured into the space between the battery anode and cathode. The hard ceramics provide safety and energy storage advantages, but are limited in how much they contact the electrodes to transfer ionic charges. Adding the polymer dramatically improves the interfacial contact between the electrodes and electrolyte while maintaining most advantages of the ceramics.

“The electrochemical stability, thermal stability and mechanical stability will be the main differences between the liquid electrolytes and these hybrids,” he said. “We’re really taking the best of both worlds. As solid-state batteries enable the use of a Li-metal anode, the ceiling for capacity is significantly higher, so we should ultimately see a dramatic increase in energy density compared to the conventional Li-ion batteries based on the liquid electrolytes.”

The hybrid ceramic-polymer electrolyte looks like a hockey puck, but will be more resistant to damage than a pure ceramic. “It will certainly be much more forgiving than a ceramic,” Stern said. “Even if micro-cracks develop, the polymer will provide the scaffolding to ensure integrity, holding it together structurally.”

Moving Ahead with Solid-State Batteries

Solid-state batteries are not yet in commercial use, but at least one EV manufacturer plans to put them into vehicles within the next few years as battery manufacturers continue to make improvements. But the technology is far less mature than existing liquid-electrolyte systems, inviting innovations such as the hybrid system the Georgia Tech researchers are working on.

The research is being supported, in part, by a $1.1 million, three-year independent research and development commitment from GTRI. “With the unprecedented federal and state investment made in Georgia for electric vehicles, battery manufacturing, and recycling, GTRI continues to build strong collaborations to help identify gaps and new business models – and to forecast the number and types of recycling plants necessary to respond to future market demands,” Stern added.

Based on encouraging results with small, laboratory-scale batteries, the researchers plan to expand their work into batteries that could be fabricated by the hundreds or thousands for further development and testing – and, ultimately, large-scale manufacturing. “As we increase our efficiency with fabrication, manufacturing costs will come down, while supply chain integration and the sustainability goals of reusability and recycling will have a big impact,” Stern said.

Model-Based System Engineering Guides the Future

Beyond demonstrating the potential for this technology, the research team also is modeling the operation of the cells to help guide future technology development and assessing the potential life cycle of the hybrid electrolyte solid-state batteries. Among the future goals are integrating the technology into supply chains that would not rely on materials sourced from conflict areas of the world, and evaluating new electrode materials such as lithium metal and silicon to replace standard graphite.

“The objective of the model-based system engineering (MBSE) task is to model expert knowledge ranging from the fabrication level to the system integration to unveil opportunities for research as well as new business models,” said Paula Gomez, a GTRI senior research engineer, and the modeling team lead.

The research team is developing models in three main areas: (1) fabrication and performance; (2) manufacturing process; and (3) reuse, refurbish, and recycling. Integrating these models involves evaluating battery efficiency and stability, cost of production, and energy consumption, as well as return on investment of recycling materials.

Though the advantages of solid-state electrolytes are very attractive, there are challenges ahead. A hybrid electrolyte system is more complicated to manufacture, and the electrical, mechanical, and chemical interactions between the materials must be thoroughly studied. “The more complexity you have, the more issues you have to understand,” Stern said.

Military and Economic Development Applications

GTRI is known for its support of national security through research sponsored by U.S. Department of Defense agencies. Stern expects the improved solid-state battery technology will ultimately find its way into military gear carried by soldiers and future generations of electrically powered military vehicles.

The work also supports economic development for the state of Georgia, which is rapidly becoming a hub for electric vehicle and battery manufacturing.

“Georgia is becoming the epicenter of the electrification revolution with vehicle makers such as Rivian and Hyundai, battery companies such as SK, FREYER Battery, and recyclers such as Ascend Elements,” Stern said. “Georgia Tech is contributing to the state’s economic development by helping drive that innovation.”

Battery Day Demonstrates Interest

A recent “Battery Day” held March 30 at Georgia Tech highlighted the broad research collaborations already underway. Led by Matthew McDowell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering, the event attracted more than 230 energy researchers and industry participants.

Beyond those already mentioned, the hybrid battery project includes Michael Shearin, Richard Wise, John Hankinson, Matthew Swarts, Khatereh Hadi, Milad Navaei, and Jack Zentner from GTRI.

 

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

 

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Overall greenhouse gas emissions in Georgia fell by 5% between 2017 and 2021, mostly due to the increased use of natural gas and solar for electricity generation, according to the research team behind the Drawdown Georgia climate initiative. Emissions from agriculture and the average individual carbon footprint also shrank.

The decline in emissions comes against a 10% expansion in the state’s economy, showing the potential for reducing emissions while pursuing economic growth, according to the team.

However, the team’s data also show a stark increase in transportation-related emissions, which now exceed pre-pandemic levels and has become the state’s largest source of climate pollution, according to Marilyn Brown, Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy and the principal investigator on the Drawdown Georgia research team.

“While not all of the numbers are trending in the right direction, these data clearly show significant improvements in many sectors of our economy and also highlight where we have the greatest opportunities, namely transportation,” Brown said.

Track Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Your County

The report shows that while emissions from the electricity sector declined more than 15% between 2017 and 2021, transportation sources including cars and trucks put out 4% more climate-warming emissions in 2021 than five years earlier. Emissions from diesel vehicles spiked 16.1%, likely due to increased demand for delivery services driven by online shopping.

Emissions from Georgia’s agricultural and food sector fell by 7.1% during the study period while the average individual carbon footprint of Georgians declined from 22,092 pounds to 20,253 pounds.

“Based on the collaborations we’re a part of, we’re confident this is only the beginning of Georgia’s carbon reduction trend,” John Lanier, executive director of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, said in a news release on the findings.

The foundation is a primary funder of Drawdown Georgia.

Brown leads the research team, which spans several Georgia colleges and universities. She is an internationally known climate policy researcher who has dedicated most of her career to helping solve the climate crisis.

The analysis is based on data from the first-of-its-kind Drawdown Georgia Emissions Tracker, which aggregates information from federal Energy Department, Transportation Department, and Environmental Protection Agency reports. The tracker was produced by a team of scientists led by William Drummond in the School of City and Regional Planning.

For a more detailed analysis of the findings, visit the Drawdown Georgia blog.

The Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI) at the Georgia Institute of Technology has launched a new science and technology research center called ReWOOD. The ReWOOD launch included a 2-day workshop involving faculty research partners from universities across the Southeast, as well as former Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black.

ReWOOD, abbreviated from “Renewables-based Economy from WOOD” will focus on a burgeoning field of science called Xylochemistry. Xylochemistry makes use of sustainable plant-based raw materials to develop industrial products ranging from jet fuel to industrial solvents to generic pharmaceutical additives and more. Right now, most of the world production of such materials comes from non-renewable fossil resources or petroleum products. Moving to a renewable source will not only aid in reducing the dependence on fossil fuels but will also help with reducing the overall carbon footprint. ReWOOD is sponsored by RBI through its endowment-funded fellowships and is developing a corporate affiliate program.

“The formation of this internal research center will drive regional momentum for producing carbon neutral chemicals and fuels from wood wastes deriving from the abundant and fast-growing wood in the Southeast,” said Carson Meredith, executive director of RBI. “In fact, the Southeast has a larger percentage of sustainably grown working forests than any other area in the U.S., and Georgia is the number one exporter of forest products in the nation.”

Research on chemical renewables via Xylochemistry has been ongoing at Georgia Tech under a consortium called GT-STANCE (Science & Technology for a Neutral Chemical Economy). GT-STANCE’s researchers have developed seed technologies that aid in the production of wood-based chemical intermediates with potential uses in consumer commodities like pharmaceuticals and plastics. In addition, RBI has made a significant investment of nearly $3 million in building research teams in the related area of lignin conversion in the last five years. The formation of a research center that will coalesce regional thought leadership is the logical next step, as a renewables-based economy has become a national priority with the bioeconomy, climate, and clean energy goals set by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.  

Raw materials for Xylochemistry could also be sourced from any kind of non-treated wood. For example, wood from demolished construction sites like old homes and wooden buildings provide an excellent opportunity for a circular economy, since this wooden construction waste ends up in landfills now.

Currently ReWOOD has 11 university affiliates that are joining Georgia Tech. In January 2023, faculty from Georgia Tech, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and Alabama A&M University convened to discuss the plans for a research center on a renewables-based economy from wood to develop renewable biofuels, industrial solvents, pharmaceutical additives, and many other products that culminated in the formation of ReWOOD. Since then, the center has gained the interest of multiple other researchers from the University of Florida, Kennesaw State University, and Clark Atlanta University. In addition, the Mississippi State and Forestry Office and Sandia National Laboratory have become key collaborators within ReWOOD. This collection of expertise includes chemists, engineers, economists, and forest experts, covering a broad range of activities that will include technology, economic, and workforce development, as well as lifecycle and socio-economic analysis. This partnership list will continue to evolve and grow as ReWOOD focuses on specific target research areas and proposals for funding to develop technology and processes in the business sector.

About the Renewable Bioproducts Institute at Georgia Tech
Georgia Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts Institute is one of ten campus interdisciplinary research institutes. RBI champions innovation in converting biomass into value-added products, developing advanced chemical and bio-based refining technologies, and advancing excellence in manufacturing processes. Our three strategic thrusts are circular materials, bio industrial manufacturing, and paper, packaging, and tissue.

RBI serves as a campus conduit for industry-university partnerships and provides a portal to Georgia Tech core laboratories, faculty and students whose work and expertise is focused on biomass and bioproducts.

 

Semiconductors, or microchips, are vital to life in the modern world. They’re used in the microwave you heated your breakfast in this morning, the car you drove to work, the mobile phone you shouldn’t use while driving, the bank ATM you visited, and the screened device you’re reading this story on.

They’re in our TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines, helping us live comfortable lives. They also help us stay alive as part of the medical network, used in pacemakers, blood pressure monitors, and MRI machines, among other things. Also, our national economic and defense systems rely on them. Basically, semiconductors control and manage the flow of information in the machinery that keeps the world going.

And right now, at Georgia Tech, researchers are working to innovate chip technology to ensure that U.S. semiconductor development is globally competitive, reliable, sustainable, and resilient, today and in the future.

“If you look at semiconductors, or the whole area of computing, it spans across Georgia Tech — across many different schools and disciplines,” said Arijit Raychudhury, professor and Steve W. Chaddick Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “Starting with physics and chemistry, where we essentially learn how different types of materials will react, to materials science and engineering, to electrical engineering and computer engineering, to computer science.”

It's a diverse, multidisciplinary enterprise from bottom to top, Raychudhury noted. And there is still plenty of room at the bottom, as theoretical physicist Richard P. Feynman famously said more than 60 years ago, predicting that one day we’d be making things at the atomic level. We are. It’s a familiar realm to Victor Fung and his lab, where they are designing new materials for semiconductors from the ground up, atom by atom.

“We are interested in exploring how to translate the latest advances in AI and machine learning to aid in accelerating computational materials simulations and materials discovery,” said Fung, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering. “We’ve been developing methods which can accurately predict a wide range of materials’ properties, to greatly facilitate high-throughput materials screening.”

Fung’s lab is using AI to discover previously unstudied materials with the electronic properties to build into chips. This approach to creating “designer” semiconductors would be significantly faster and cover more of the materials space than current methods.

Improving the Landscape

Smaller, more efficient, and more powerful are all part of the constantly evolving landscape in semiconductor research and development. It’s a very expensive landscape. While many chips are about the size of a fingernail, they are among the most complex human-made objects on Earth. Just building a semiconductor fabrication factory costs billions of dollars.

For a chemical engineer like Michael Filler, that sounds like opportunity.

“Chemical engineers think about how we produce products on a massive scale,” said Filler, associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and associate director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN).

Filler, whose research involves the growing of semiconductor components, like transistors, from seed particles, is aiming to help democratize the process of chip development, bringing down the cost substantially while maintaining performance. In a not too distant future, that could mean an individual at home printing a chip on a machine similar to a 3D printer.

“Imagine a laser printer that can literally spit out custom electronics in a matter of minutes,” Filler said. “We’re big believers in the individual’s ability to be creative and know what they want to build for their applications. Ultimately, we’re interested in giving makers and prototypers opportunities to customize electronics.”

He’s in the right place for the far-reaching research he has in mind, adding, “We are so blessed with great facilities at Georgia Tech. It would be hard to imagine working somewhere else, because very few places have the diversity and quality of tooling we have here.”

IEN, which facilitates much of the semiconductor research at Georgia Tech, is based in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, with its state-of-the-art micro/nano fabrication facilities such as the shared cleanroom space and a laser machine lab for micromachining.

But it is the range of expertise and creativity among faculty and students who are making IEN and Georgia Tech a thought leader in semiconductor research. This is evidenced by Tech’s recent grant of $65.7 million from the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Defense Research Projects Agency to launch two new interdisciplinary research centers.

Events like Georgia Tech Chip Day (May 2) and Nanowire Week, an international gathering happening in Atlanta in October, also speak to Tech’s growing influence in this area.

Answering the Call

The Covid-19 pandemic clarified just how difficult it can be to make more chips. A shortage of semiconductors affected the supply of phones, computers, and other commonly used items during the global shutdown. Increased demand, depleted reserves, and too few manufacturing plants and workers significantly crippled the supply chain.

“The high degree of geographic concentration in certain parts of the semiconductor supply chain has recently created a heightened risk of supply interruptions,” said Chip White, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). “Such interruptions and resulting wild fluctuations in semiconductor demand can threaten the nation’s public health, defense, and economic security.”

With that in mind, translational supply chain research is going on in several places on campus, White said, including the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute and the NSF AI Research Institute for Advances in Optimization. White and his colleagues are developing software platforms for stress testing manufacturing supply chains. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities and risk mitigation procedures to design and operate next generation supply chains for critical industries such as the semiconductor industry, to improve global competitiveness and strike a balance between market forces and national security.

In an effort to address and feed the next generation demand for chips, the Biden administration recently launched a massive effort to outcompete China in semiconductor manufacturing, offering $39 billion in funding incentives for companies seeking to build plants in the U.S.

Another related area of importance in the ongoing development of semiconductors is growing the workforce of the future, and that includes a new wave of researchers. This is a role that Jennifer Hasler takes seriously.

“I have a strong interest and belief in mentoring,” said Hasler, ECE professor and founder of the Integrated Computational Electronics lab at Georgia Tech. She’s proven, theoretically at least, that the technology already exists to build a silicon-based version of the human cerebral cortex (which would cost billions of dollars to design and build), but one of her favorite roles is working with new, young faculty.

“It’s a personal thing for me, but it’s one of the coolest things I’m involved in,” she said. “When they come to Georgia Tech, they see how big this place is, bigger than a company. I like to say to them, ‘Let’s calm down, take a breath, you’re good, so let’s go make some cool stuff. Let’s get some momentum going.’”

For Raychowdhury, director of the new Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems (part of the JUMP 2.0 program), developing the skilled workforce of the future means answering the call of the nation.

“This is one of the largest ECE departments in the country, with many, many talented students,” he said. “And given the need and shortage of skilled professionals in this particular area, I think it’s critical for us to create that kind of pipeline.” Last year, ECE undergraduate students started taking a new, two-semester course, sponsored by Apple, in which they actually build microprocessors from scratch.

“This is completely new,” Raychowdhury said. “It’s expensive to offer this course, but we plan to keep doing it and we’re in conversations with other companies that want to invest in workforce development. So, in addition to doing fantastic research, we want to be sensitive to the needs of the country and a new generation.”

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Writer: Jerry Grillo

Richard Neu leads the Materials in Extreme Environments research initiative for the Institute for Materials at Georgia Tech. In this role, he is working to engage and build an interdisciplinary research community to address the complex issues associated with new materials in extreme environments. These environments include high temperature, high pressure, corrosive, wear/erosion, cyclic loading, high-rate impacts, and radiation. Neu is also a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a courtesy appointment in the School of Materials Science Engineering and director of the Mechanical Properties Characterization Facility.

In this brief Q&A, Neu discusses his research focus, how it relates to materials research, and the impact of this initiative.

What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area?

My field of expertise is the mechanical behavior of materials, mainly structural alloys. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I chose to study engineering mechanics, which is the discipline explaining the way materials behave under loads and displacements. This led me to conduct undergraduate research on the thermomechanical mechanical fatigue of railway wheels, which occurs from the brake shoe application on the tread resulting in frictional heating of the wheel's surface. On a long downward grade, the wheel treads can get red hot, since the brakes are continuously applied. The strength and elastic properties of the wheel steel are reduced, and permanent changes such as the formation of residual stresses and changes in the microstructure degrade the mechanical behavior after repeated braking. Understanding and predicting this response enables more durable wheel steels and designs.

In my early career, I investigated several problems that involved structural materials needing to survive extreme environments. These included the understanding of the mechanisms leading to hot bearings in railway freight cars, the thermomechanical response of the skin material for hypersonic aircraft, and the thermomechanical fatigue and creep of hot turbine sections in gas turbines for both propulsion and energy generation. These problems are changing because high strength, high creep resistance, and good fracture toughness are needed, while the material itself continues to evolve at these high temperatures. In addition, chemical reactions can occur, significantly affecting the microstructure and mechanical behavior of the material near the surface. The problem of understanding these materials operating in these extreme environments entails a multidisciplinary approach involving mechanics, metallurgy, manufacturing processes, tribology, and machine design.

What questions or challenges sparked your current materials research?

My current research does not deviate much from my early days of research. The most challenging problems in the mechanical behavior of materials involve pushing materials to their extremes. There is a continuing need to discover and design structural alloys and composites with improved high-temperature properties, with reduced degradation in the environment they must withstand, whether corrosive, cryogenic, high temperature, or more often, a combination of these. Today, these challenges include developing more efficient gas turbine systems that can burn alternative fuels such as hydrogen, rolling bearing and gear steels that have higher reliability, and establishing quality assurance for materials manufactured using additive manufacturing and other novel processes to ensure that they will survive these extreme environments.

Why is your initiative important to the development of Georgia Tech’s Materials research strategy?

Leading the initiative for Materials in Extreme Environments, I desired to bring together faculty and researchers working in this area and those working on applications that involve materials operating in extreme environments. This year we identified one important application area where Georgia Tech is taking the lead. Hydrogen is likely to be a major player in the future green energy economy. One challenge to realizing a hydrogen energy economy is the efficient and low-cost generation, storage, and transport of hydrogen. In alloys, the degradation due to hydrogen embrittlement is one of the concerns that must be addressed. Both the materials understanding in this environment and the design of newer materials and surface modifications are needed. Furthermore, this needs to be accomplished at a large scale and low cost.

What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct?

The work we do enables safer and lower life cycle costs of mechanical systems, critically important for all the highly loaded structural components of aircraft and other transportation systems, hypersonic aircraft and rocket systems, gas turbine systems, nuclear power generation systems, and immense wind turbine components, as well as materials used in medical devices that are implanted in humans. Our research provides the knowledge and engineering tools to achieve a safer world and superior mechanical systems that improve the quality of life.

What are your plans for engaging a wider GT faculty pool with IMat research?

We are engaging with external experts to understand the needs in materials for the hydrogen value chain. While much research today is focused on producing green hydrogen through lower cost electrolysis and using hydrogen for energy generation with fuel cells, a big challenge of storing and transporting the hydrogen from its production to where it will be used requires novel solutions and materials. This involves, for example, storing hydrogen under extreme pressures in an environment where hydrogen itself can react and degrade the mechanical properties of the materials. The time is right for a diverse group of faculty to work on the storage and transportation challenges to facilitate energy having a substantial reduction in the carbon footprint while also reducing the life cycle costs of the infrastructure.

Marilyn A. Brown, Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy, has been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Brown, an internationally noted scholar in climate and energy policy, is among 269 eminent experts from academia, the arts, and private industry chosen by the organization this year and one of just two from Georgia Tech. Rafael Bras, professor in the College of Engineering and Georgia Tech’s former provost, also will join the academy — which in addition to being an honorary society seeks the counsel of its members to help solve significant global challenges via a range of cross-disciplinary research programs. 

“I’m grateful and honored to be elected to the company of such esteemed experts,” said Brown. “I look forward to working with them to foster smart and achievable policy solutions to help advance moves towards a new green economy and more sustainable tomorrow.” 

She joins 11 other Georgia Tech faculty members in the organization, including Kaye Husbands Fealing, dean and Ivan Allen Jr. Chair in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. 

“In its earliest days, the Academy sought members who would help address issues and opportunities confronting a young nation,” Nancy C. Andrews, chair of the academy’s Board of Directors, said in a release announcing the new members. “We feel a similar urgency and have elected a class that brings diverse expertise to meet the pressing challenges and possibilities that America and the world face today.” 

Brown already was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of just six living Georgia Tech faculty elected to the NAS and 36 who are members of the NAE. 

An international leader in clean energy policy, Brown is known for her pioneering work developing economic-engineering models incorporating behavioral and social science principles into policy analysis of energy systems. Her influential research quantified the “energy-efficiency gap,” which highlights the importance of promoting cost-effective energy conservation improvements as a tool to improve energy security and reduce the impact of climate change. 

In 2000, she led the Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future project, which at the time was the most detailed carbon-reduction analysis funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  

Later, she contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group that was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. 

More recently, she has been the principal investigator leading the science team behind Drawdown Georgia, a multi-institution effort funded by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation to identify the most promising solutions to slash Georgia’s carbon emissions by 2030. 

The Department of Energy has selected Georgia Institute of Technology as the Southeastern Regional Center of Excellence to enhance and expand the Industrial Assessment Centers (IACs) program. This new Center, in partnership with Clark Atlanta University, Kennesaw State University and Florida A&M University, will serve as a regional hub that collaborates and coordinates with government, nonprofit, labor, and industry actors to train clean energy workers and support small- and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) in their respective regions.

The Center involves two neighboring IACs comprised of the four universities and will serve as a regional and national enrichment resource for fellow IACs.

Specifically, the proposed Center of Excellence will: 1) leverage team expertise to advance the identification of technologies and approaches which increase energy efficiency, decarbonization, and productivity in cost-effective manner; 2) provide exemplars that facilitate networking and leveraging between IACs and complementary stakeholders (e.g., National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Manufacturing Extension Partnerships); and 3) equitably develop the clean energy workforce of the future – in part via the leadership role of the two HBCUs and the expansion of the Technologies for High Efficiency Realization via Minority Scholars (THERMS) program.

The proposed Center of Excellence is a natural leverage point and extension of the team’s present activities including:

• Applied Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) research projects that directly map to highlighted technology interests within the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), hence vivid subject matter expertise to aid identifying implementation opportunities;

• Direct involvement of National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Manufacturing Extension Partnerships;

• Delivery of credentialing energy management courses that are periodically enrolled by active workforce professionals, as well as faculty and students from other IACs.

Finally, the proposed Center of Excellence will also be a hub to receive and distribute insights from IACs within the region, and there will be keen attention upon distinctive needs within the Southeast (e.g., both clean and resilient energy enhancement given disruptive possibilities such as hurricanes). The two IACs’ location in metro-Atlanta and Georgia/North Florida allows the Center of Excellence to service underserved communities both in urban and rural locations.

Comas Haynes, research engineer at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) said, “This award is both an honor and excellent opportunity to expand Georgia Tech’s regional and national service of clean energy interventions and workforce development. Our partnership with Kennesaw State University, Clark Atlanta University, and Florida A&M University brings together University System of Georgia institutions, as well as leading HBCUs, and we look forward to supporting other IACs’ increased impact within the Southeast.”