Four MechSE students win Department of Energy Fellowships

From controlling air conditioning systems to making smaller power sources, MechSE grad students are making real contributions to energy research. Four students won Department of Energy (DoE) Fellowships in recognition and support of their work.

Winners of DoE's fellowships

The DoE grants each fellowship recipient a stipend of $35,000 a year, eligibility to receive up to $10,500 toward university fees, and $5,000 a year for research.

James Henry Pikul’s research is among the projects that the DoE helps fund every year.

MechSE professor William (Bill) P. King and MatSE professor Paul V. Braun envisioned the day a cell phone charger powers an entire home. Pikul, a graduate research assistant, said he and the professors will probably start by powering smaller objects, working on increasing the amount of energy a small charger provides to as much as 2,000 times of what it is now.

According to Pikul, in order to maximize the amount of energy a small charger can release, researchers increase the power density per volume unit.

“Basically, we create novel nanoarchitectures [microscopic DNA structures] to reduce the diffusion length and active material to get a really fast transfer of lithium ions and electrons,” Pikul said. “Therefore, we get much higher power densities.”

In the early application stages, Pikul said he devoted the most time to his essays.

“What you say is going to change a lot from what you think you are going to say, especially if you are a younger student,” Pikul said. “You need to go through and read a couple of papers important to that field. You want to understand what the problems in that field are and then think of some way to solve those problems. You don’t need to come up with some technology to solve the problems; you just need a method to finding that technology.”

With the fellowship, students are also invited to attend the annual DoE meeting, where they meet other fellowship recipients.

Neera Jain, a graduate research assistant and fellowship recipient for three years now, said her experience at the meetings across the country was a special perk of being part of the DoE Fellowship program.

“I’ve been an engineer now for ten years and most of my colleagues are engineers,” Jain said. “It was eye-opening to learn about the perspective of students studying the pure sciences because the way they approach research is often different than the way that engineers do.” Nevertheless, she emphasized that “You need both communities [scientists and engineers] to develop new ideas which will advance technology as a whole.”

Meanwhile, DoE’s financial support helped Jain kick off her doctoral research with MechSE professor Andrew G. Alleyne in using ideas from control theory and thermodynamics to design a physics-based optimization framework for a wide class of integrated energy systems, such as cogeneration plants and individual thermal systems with the ultimate goal of improving their efficiency and performance.

“Control systems are used to literally ‘control’ a systems’ behavior,” Jain said. “By doing this in an optimal way, with respect to energy efficiency, we have an opportunity to significantly reduce energy consumption across a large range of systems which is a major priority for our nation.”

And the topic of efficiency is an area that Jonathan Robert Felts, a fifth-year PhD candidate, is especially familiar with after receiving funding from the DoE. Under the advisement of Professor King, Felts uses heatable, nanometer sharp tips to deposit polymer at the nanometer scale. The heated tip works much like a hot glue gun, where polymer on the tip melts and flows when the tip gets hot. He hopes to one day use heated tips to make organic optoelectronic devices.

“Polymer technology is going to be very big in the future because polymer is lightweight, flexible, and can possess many of the optical and electrical properties found in materials currently used for most consumer electronics,” Felts said.

He plans to continue researching nanometer scale device manufacturing after the DoE fellowship ends.

Another DoE fellowship recipient Matt Rosenberger has more time to think about continuing his research post-funding as he enters the first year of his fellowship. He applied for it during the second year of his master’s degree.

“One worthwhile use of this money will be for travel to visit collaborators and to attend conferences,” Rosenberger said.

He works with Professor King to measure heat flows using biomaterial beams, or microcantilevers. These beams bend when heated, so measuring cantilever bending allows Rosenberger to quantify heat flow through the cantilever.

“My work aims to optimize the materials and geometry of bimaterial microcantilevers in order to improve the sensitivity of this technique,” Rosenberger said.

Rosenberger encourages all interested students to apply.

“This experience helped me demonstrate my potential for success and also made me more confident as I wrote my application essays,” he said.