Smith looks forward to teaching, collaborations

Assistant Professor Kyle Smith is in the business of batteries. His research has ranged from the storage of hydrogen on board fuel cell vehicles, to flow batteries, to devices that could eventually be used for large-scale energy storage on the electrical grid.

Smith’s work is in computational modeling. As a PhD student at Purdue, he created models to predict the morphology of metal hydride particles and analyze how the shape of the particles affected heat flow inside the material. As a postdoc, he created models of flow batteries.

"For flow batteries, it’s not just the active materials that store charge that are important," Smith said. "The microstructure of current-collecting material and the battery’s design affect how ionic and electronic charge flow through it, and also the mechanics of it are very important because in a flow battery the electrodes are fluids that are pumped through the battery. I was working with a new kind of flow battery that uses suspensions of solid components and solid active materials to store charge and developed, from the computational models, strategies to maximize the efficiency with which these kinds of devices operate."

Efficiency is also crucial in Smith’s current research, on large-scale energy storage devices. The goal is to use electrochemical-based means, including flow batteries and lithium-ion batteries, to store excess energy flowing through the electrical grid. Excess energy is a significant problem for renewable energy sources in particular, but it will only be cost-effective if they are efficient.

"Wind and solar power have an inherent intermittency to their supply," Smith said. "We can’t predict when the wind is going to blow precisely, or even when the sun is going to shine with a particular intensity. When you have that energy available, you want to store it up so it can be used when it’s actually demanded. The electric grid does not currently have a lot of infrastructure in this regard."

Smith says that he enjoys teaching a great deal, and is looking forward to interacting with students in the department. In particular, he hopes to show them the connection between concepts in the classroom and applications outside of it, something he learned while working for a chemical company during his undergraduate career.

"I found that when I had some idea of what real engineers did in industry, and then I saw a concept in the classroom and realized that I could apply it to a real problem, the educational experience was so much more exciting and interesting to me," Smith said. "It caused me to think critically about what I was learning. I like to bring those kinds of applications into the classroom to get students excited about what they’re learning. I’m looking forward to teaching, to developing relationships with students and to share with them what I’ve learned and to be part of their growth."

The reputation of MechSE for supporting interdisciplinary work has preceded it, it seems, as Smith says it is one of the main reasons he looked at Illinois.

"Not only does Illinois have a good engineering program, but there are also strong programs in the sciences aside from engineering which intrigues me," Smith said, “mainly because the work that I do is of an interdisciplinary nature. I enjoy interacting with people in my discipline, but also outside just because there’s a lot of opportunity for me to learn new things and to bring my understanding to the table in a variety of problem contexts. So that was very exciting to me, and actually coming here and seeing and hearing from so many faculty that this place invites that kind of collaborative interaction, there’s low barriers to have those kinds of research relationships, to me that sounds like a very fertile place to work."