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document.write('<li class="rss_item"><a class="rss_item" href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/sap-mitei.html"  target="_self">SA+P’s growing role in MIT’s Energy Initiative</a>');
document.write('<br />Nearly a third of 13 new projects recently funded by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) are being led by faculty in the School of Architecture + Planning. <br /><br />Established as a top priority by President Susan Hockfield in September 2006, MITEI is an Institute-wide initiative designed to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the future, and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today\'s energy systems. <br /><br />To date, MITEI\'s seed fund program has supported more than 50 early stage research proposals plus ignition and planning grants, including previous grants to SA+P professors Marilyne Andersen, John Fernandez, Michael Flaxman, Judith Layzer and Les Norford. Of the four new projects at SA+P, two have received seed grants — funding that lasts from one to two years — and two have been awarded shorter-term ‘planning grants’. <br /><br /><a mce_href=\"http://sap.mit.edu/resources/portfolio/4_projects/\" href=\"http://sap.mit.edu/resources/portfolio/4_projects/\">Read more</a>.<i><br /><br /><br /></i>');
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document.write('<li class="rss_item"><a class="rss_item" href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/liquid-battery.html"  target="_self">Liquid battery big enough for the electric grid?</a>');
document.write('<br />There’s one major drawback to most proposed renewable-energy sources: their variability. The sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow, and tides, waves and currents fluctuate. That’s why many researchers have been pursuing ways of storing the power generated by these sources so that it can be used when it’s needed.<br /><br />So far, those solutions have tended to be too expensive, limited to only certain areas, or difficult to scale up sufficiently to meet the demands. Many researchers are struggling to overcome these limitations, but MIT professor Donald Sadoway has come up with an innovative approach that has garnered significant interest — and some major funding.<br /><br />The idea is to build an entirely new kind of battery, whose key components would be kept at high temperature so that they would stay entirely in liquid form. The experimental devices currently being tested in Sadoway’s lab work in a way that’s never been attempted in batteries before.<br /><br />This month, the newly established federal agency ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy) announced its first 37 energy-research grants out of a pool of 3,600 applications, and Sadoway’s project to develop utility-scale batteries received one of the largest sums — almost $7 million over five years. And within a few days of the ARPA-E announcement, the French oil company Total — the world’s fifth-largest — announced a $4 million, five-year joint venture with MIT to develop a smaller-scale version of the same technology, suitable for use in individual homes or other buildings.<br /><br />Because the technology is being patented and could lead to very large-scale commercialization, Sadoway will not discuss the details of the materials being used. But both Sadoway and ARPA-E say the battery is based on low-cost, domestically available liquid metals that have the potential to shatter the cost barrier to large-scale energy storage as part of the nation\'s energy grid. In announcing its funding of Sadoway’s work, ARPA-E said the battery technology “could revolutionize the way electricity is used and produced on the grid, enabling round-the-clock power from America\'s wind and solar power resources, increasing the stability of the grid, and making blackouts a thing of the past.”<br /><br />Andrew Chung, a principal at Lightspeed Venture Partners in Menlo Park, Calif., which has no equity stake in Sadoway’s project at this point, says that “grid-scale storage is an area that’s set to explode in the next decade or so,” and is one that his company is following closely. The liquid battery concept Sadoway is developing “is an exciting approach to solving the problem,” he says.<br /><br /><b>Big is beautiful</b><br /><br />Most battery research, Sadoway says, has been aimed at improving storage for portable or mobile systems such as cellphones, computers and cars. The requirements for such systems, including very low weight and high safety, are very different from the needs of a grid-scale, fixed-location battery system. “What I did was completely ignore the conventional technology used for portable power,” he says. The different set of requirements for stationary systems “opens up a whole new range of possibilities.”<br /><br />A large, utility-owned system “doesn’t have to be crash-worthy; it doesn’t have to be ‘idiot-proof’ because it won’t be in the hands of the consumer.” And while consumers are willing to pay high prices, pound-for-pound, for the small batteries used in high-value portable devices, the biggest constraint on utility-sized systems is cost. In order to compete with present fossil-fuel power systems, he says, “it has got to be cheap to build, cheap to maintain, last a long time with minimal maintenance, and store enormous amounts of energy.”<br /><br />And so the new liquid batteries that Sadoway and his team, including graduate student David Bradwell, are designing use low-cost, abundant materials. The basic principle is to place three layers of liquid inside a container: Two different metal alloys, and one layer of a salt. The three materials are chosen so that they have different densities that allow them to separate naturally into three distinct layers, with the salt in the middle separating the two metal layers —like novelty drinks with different layers. <br /><br />The energy is stored in the liquid metals that want to react with one another but can do so only by transferring ions — electrically charged atoms of one of the metals — across the electrolyte, which results in the flow of electric current out of the battery. When the battery is being charged, some ions migrate through the insulating salt layer to collect at one of the terminals. Then, when the power is being drained from the battery, those ions migrate back through the salt and collect at the opposite terminal.<br /><br />The whole device is kept at a high temperature, around 700 degrees Celsius, so that the layers remain molten. In the small devices being tested in the lab, maintaining this temperature requires an outside heater, but Sadoway says that in the full-scale version, the electrical current being pumped into, or out of, the battery will be sufficient to maintain that temperature without any outside heat source.<br /><br />While some previous battery technologies have used one liquid-metal component, this is the first design for an all-liquid battery system, Sadoway says. “Solid components in batteries are speed bumps. When you want ultra-high current, you don’t want any solids.”<br /><br /><b>Inspiration from aluminum </b><br /><br />The initial inspiration for the idea came from thinking about a very different technology, Sadoway says: one of the biggest users of electrical energy, aluminum smelting plants. Sadoway realized that this was one of the few existing examples of a system that could sustain extremely high levels of electrical current over a sustained period of years at a time. “It’s an electrochemical process that runs at high temperatures, and at a current of hundreds of thousands of amps,” he says. In a sense, the new concept is like an aluminum plant running in reverse, producing power instead of consuming it.<br /><br />Chung says that from the point of view of a venture capitalist, the research is particularly intriguing for several reasons. Not only does it offer the potential to significantly lower the cost and increase cycle life [the number of times it can be charged and discharged] of large-scale electricity storage, but it also suggests that the risk typically associated with an early stage research project may be lower because the system draws on decades of experience in the design and operation of aluminum production facilities. “That gives us added confidence that some of the targets around cost, scalability and safety have merit,” he says.<br /><br />The team is now testing a number of different variations of the exact composition of the materials in the three layers, and of the design of the overall device. Sadoway says that thanks to initial funding through the Deshpande Center and the Chesonis Family Foundation, he and his team were able to develop the concept to the point of demonstrating a proof-of-principle at the laboratory scale. That, in turn, made it possible to get the large grants to develop the technology further.<br /><br />“It’s an example of work that sprang from basic science, was developed to a pilot scale, and now is being scaled up to have a real transformational impact in the world,” says Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative.<br /><br />The laboratory tests have provided “some measure of confidence,” Sadoway says. But many more tests will be needed&nbsp; to “demonstrate that the idea is scalable to industrial size, at competitive cost.” But while he is very confident that it will all work, there are a lot of unknowns, he says, including how to design and build the necessary containers, electrical control systems, and connections.<br /><br />“We’re talking about batteries of a size never seen before,” he says. And the system they develop has to include everything, including control systems and charger electronics on an unprecedented scale.<br /><br />For Sadoway, the project is worth pursuing despite its daunting challenges, because the potential impact is so great. “I’m not doing this because I want another journal publication,” Sadoway says. “It’s about making a difference … It’s an opportunity to invent our way out of the energy problem.”<br /><br /><br />');
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document.write('<li class="rss_item"><a class="rss_item" href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/thermoelectric.html"  target="_self">Turning heat to electricity</a>');
document.write('<br />In everything from computer processor chips to car engines to electric powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat creates a major source of inefficiency. But new research points the way to a technology that might make it possible to harvest much of that wasted heat and turn it into usable electricity.<br /><br />That kind of waste-energy harvesting might, for example, lead to cellphones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in, or power plants that put out more electricity for a given amount of fuel, says Peter Hagelstein, co-author of a paper on the new concept <a mce_href=\"http://link.aip.org/link/?JAP/106/094315\" href=\"http://link.aip.org/link/?JAP/106/094315\">appearing this month in the Journal of Applied Physics</a>.<br /><br />Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says existing solid-state devices to convert heat into electricity are not very efficient. The new research, carried out with graduate student Dennis Wu as part of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find how close realistic technology could come to achieving the theoretical limits for the efficiency of such conversion. <br /><br />Theory says that such energy conversion can never exceed a specific value called the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th-century formula for determining the maximum efficiency that any device can achieve in converting heat into work. But current commercial thermoelectric devices only achieve about one-tenth of that limit, Hagelstein says. In experiments involving a different new technology, thermal diodes, Hagelstein worked with Yan Kucherov, now a consultant for the Naval Research Laboratory, and coworkers to demonstrate efficiency as high as 40 percent of the Carnot Limit. Moreover, the calculations show that this new kind of system could ultimately reach as much as 90 percent of that ceiling. <br /><br />Hagelstein, Wu and others started from scratch rather than trying to improve the performance of existing devices. They carried out their analysis using a very simple system in which power was generated by a single quantum-dot device — a type of semiconductor in which the electrons and holes, which carry the electrical charges in the device, are very tightly confined in all three dimensions. By controlling all aspects of the device, they hoped to better understand how to design the ideal thermal-to-electric converter. <br /><br />Hagelstein says that with present systems it’s possible to efficiently convert heat into electricity, but with very little power. It’s also possible to get plenty of electrical power — what is known as high-throughput power — from a less efficient, and therefore larger and more expensive system. “It’s a tradeoff. You either get high efficiency or high throughput,” says Hagelstein. But the team found that using their new system, it would be possible to get both at once, he says.<br /><br />A key to the improved throughput was reducing the separation between the hot surface and the conversion device. A recent paper by MIT professor Gang Chen reported on an analysis showing that heat transfer could take place between very closely spaced surfaces at a rate that is orders of magnitude higher than predicted by theory.&nbsp; The new report takes that finding a step further, showing how the heat can not only be transferred, but converted into electricity so that it can be harnessed. <br /><br />A company called MTPV Corp. (for Micron-gap Thermal Photo-Voltaics), founded by Robert DiMatteo SM ’96, MBA ‘06, is already working on the development of “a new technology closely related to the work described in this paper,” Hagelstein says.<br /><br />DiMatteo says he hopes eventually to commercialize Hagelstein’s new idea. In the meantime, he says the technology now being developed by his company, which he expects to have on the market next year, could produce a tenfold improvement in throughput power over existing photovoltaic devices, while the further advance described in this new paper could make an additional tenfold or greater improvement possible. The work described in this paper “is potentially a&nbsp; major finding,” he says. <br /><br />DiMatteo says that worldwide, about 60 percent of all the energy produced by burning fuels or generated in powerplants is wasted, mostly as excess heat, and that this technology could “make it possible to reclaim a significant fraction of that wasted energy.” <br /><br />When this work began around 2002, Hagelstein says, such devices&nbsp; “clearly could not be built. We started this as purely a theoretical exercise.” But developments since then have brought it much closer to reality.<br /><br />While it may take a few years for the necessary technology for building affordable quantum-dot devices to reach commercialization, Hagelstein says, “there’s no reason, in principle, you couldn’t get another order of magnitude or more” improvement in throughput power, as well as an improvement in efficiency.<br /><br />“There’s a gold mine in waste heat, if you could convert it,” he says. The first applications are likely to be in high-value systems such as computer chips, he says, but ultimately it could be useful in a wide variety of applications, including cars, planes and boats. “A lot of heat is generated to go places, and a lot is lost. If you could recover that, your transportation technology is going to work better.”<br /><br /><br mce_bogus=\"1\">');
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document.write('<li class="rss_item"><a class="rss_item" href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/bioplastics.html"  target="_self">One word: bioplastics</a>');
document.write('<br />Every year, more than 540 billion pounds of plastic are produced worldwide. Much of it ends up in the world’s oceans, a fact that troubles MIT biology professor Anthony Sinskey.<br /><br />“Plastic does not degrade in the ocean. It just gets ground up into tiny particles,” he says. In the Pacific Ocean, a vast swath twice the size of Texas teems with tiny bits of oil-based plastic that can poison ocean life.<br /><br />Sinskey can’t do much about the plastic that’s already polluting the Earth’s oceans, but he is trying to help keep the problem from getting worse. Next month, a company he founded with his former postdoc, Oliver Peoples, will open a new factory that uses MIT-patented technology to build plastic from corn. The plant aims to produce annually 110 million pounds of the new bioplastic, which biodegrades in soil or the ocean.<br /><br />That’s a fraction of one percent of the United States’ overall plastic production, which totaled 101.5 billion pounds in 2008. Though it will take bioplastics a long time before they can start making a dent in that figure, the industry has significant growth potential, says Melissa Hockstad, vice president for science, technology and regulatory affairs for SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association. <br /><br />“Bioplastics are making inroads into new markets and are an important area to watch for the future of the plastics industry,” says Hockstad, who noted that the current global market for biodegradable polymers is estimated at about 570 million pounds per year but is expected to more than double by 2012. <br /><br /><b>‘Timing is everything’</b><br /><br />For Sinskey and Peoples, the road started 25 years ago. Peoples, who had just earned his PhD in molecular biology from the University of Aberdeen, arrived in Sinskey’s lab in 1984 and set out to sequence a bacterial gene. Today, high-speed sequencing machines could do the job in about a week. Back then, it took three years.<br /><br />That gene, from the bacterium R. eutropha, turned out to code for an enzyme that allows bacteria to produce polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) — a naturally occurring form of polyester — starting with only sunlight, water, and a carbon source. (Bacteria normally manufacture PHA as a way to store carbon and energy.)<br /><br />Sinskey and Peoples realized that if they could ramp up the bacteria’s plastic producing abilities, they could harness the organisms for industrial use. In 1994, they started a company called Metabolix and took out exclusive patents from MIT on the gene work they had done on PHA-synthesizing bacteria.<br /><br />Thus began a 15-year effort to develop the technology into a robust, large-scale process, and to win support for such an approach.<br /><br />On the scientific side, Peoples and the scientists at Metabolix developed a method to incorporate several genes from different bacteria into a strain of E. coli. Using this process, now called metabolic engineering, they eventually created a strain that produces PHA at levels several-fold higher than naturally occurring bacteria.<br /><br />However, they had some difficulty generating support (and funding) for the idea. In the early 1990s, the public was not very receptive to the idea of alternative plastics. “Oil was $20 a barrel, and people didn’t believe in global warming,” Peoples recalls.<br /><br />“Timing is everything,” says Sinskey. “There has to be a market for these materials” for them to be successful.<br /><br /><b>‘Growing interest’</b><br /><br />The scientists believe that consumers are now ready for bioplastics. Such plastics have been commercially available for about a decade, mostly in the form of plastic cups, bottles and food packaging. Most of those products are made from a type of plastic called polylactic acid (PLA), which is also produced from corn. PLA is similar to PHA, but PHA has higher heat resistance, according to Peoples.<br /><br />Possible uses for the Metabolix bioplastics include packaging, agricultural film, compost bags, business equipment and consumer products such as personal care products, gift cards and pens. Products like these, along with existing bioplastic products, tap into a “growing interest in materials that can be made from renewable resources or disposed of through practices such as composting,” says Hockstad.<br /><br />The new Metabolix plant, located in Clinton, Iowa, is a joint venture with Archer Daniels Midland. Metabolix is also working to engineer crops — including switchgrass — that will grow the plastic directly within the plant. <br /><br />Turning to those agricultural starting materials could help reduce the amount of petroleum needed to manufacture traditional plastics, which currently requires about 2 million barrels of oil per day (10 percent of total U.S. daily oil consumption). “It’s important to develop alternative ways to make these chemicals,” says Peoples.<br /><br /><br />');
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document.write('<li class="rss_item"><a class="rss_item" href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/systems-thinking.html"  target="_self">Energy, environment, health care discussed at annual Systems Thinking Conference</a>');
document.write('<br />As President Obama hailed MIT’s commitment to energy research during his recent visit to campus, MIT’s System Design and Management Program (SDM) was tackling a range of issues critical to the nation — not only energy, but the environment and health care — at its annual \"Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges\" conference. 	   	    <p>\"To address any of these issues, you have to take a systems perspective,\" said Associate Professor Olivier de Weck, associate director of the MIT Engineering Systems Division (home to SDM), which is pioneering integrative methodologies to address these challenges. \"Everything is linked.\"</p>  <p>A \"systems perspective\" examines complex problems within a broader context of intertwined technological, business and social issues. Taking such a view is critical to solving complex problems, and the work requires integrating approaches from engineering, management and the social sciences, said de Weck.</p>   <p>More than 250 representatives from industry, nonprofit organizations, and academia attended SDM’s conference, held Oct. 22-23 at the Broad Auditorium. The first day centered on infrastructure, notably energy and the environment.</p>  <p>Sharon L. Nunes, IBM’s vice president of Big Green Innovations, outlined the dire state of water management — both in the United States (36 states expect availability problems in the coming decade) and the world (about 40 percent of people already live in a water stressed area) — and described how IBM is working to optimize usage and incentivize conservation through water metering and monitoring.</p>  <p>Creating instrumentation for water systems — including their interconnections, their links to other infrastructure, and knowledge-sharing (often influenced by social and economic factors) — can provide the data needed for intelligent management of the system, she said. She added that good water management is critical to good health, societal stability (as droughts can force migrations), and the economy.</p>  <p>The same is true of energy system management, said Lawrence Willey, manager for Wind Systems Conceptual Design at GE Infrastructure. Like water, energy is affected by political, economic, and societal influences that cannot be addressed with technology alone.</p>   <p>GE Infrastructure is working to reach the goal of 20 percent wind generation by 2030 in the United States, but cannot do so without facing multiple systems issues, Willey said. It is particularly challenging to integrate wind energy, which is intermittent and weather-dependent, into the existing electrical grid, which must meet the peaks and valleys of demand exactly, he said. Better storage options, improved transmission, and a smarter electrical grid may all be needed to meet needs effectively and efficiently — within a larger societal and business framework.</p>  <p>Day two of the conference — which featured a live, lunchtime showing of President Obama’s speech — focused on the \"unbelievable systems nightmare that is U.S. health care today,\" as Dr. Blackford Middleton of Partners HealthCare System described it.</p>  <p>Middleton characterized our current system as an interconnected network of dependencies — doctors send out labwork and bill insurers; labs send results to doctors and bill patients; insurers pay doctors and apprise patients of benefits; and so on. All of these interactions generate information, yet much of the nation’s records are still on paper — a notorious source of errors, said Middleton, who directs clinical informatics research and development at Partners.</p>   <p>\"We have a significant knowledge management problem,\" he said.</p>  <p>Middleton illustrated the benefits of improving the flow of knowledge by relating his experience with the electronic medical records system Partners built, which includes a database that helps doctors make decisions about patient care. Partners worked to create a solution that is not just technical, but takes into consideration the needs of management (saving money and labor), doctors (making the system easy to use), and patients (improving their experience), he said.</p>   <p>\"It’s not a panacea,\" he admitted, but the system has made it easier for doctors to do multiple tasks at point-of-care, and the documentation has led to better compliance with protocols.</p>  <p>Joseph F. Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, emphasized the need for entirely new ways of thinking about the health-care system, asking the audience: As a consumer, do you want the existing system to be better, or do you want a completely different system?</p>  <p>\"If innovation is what’s needed, researchers as well as industry leaders have to be willing to take trends seriously — because expectations will change how we define, design, and deliver value,\" he said. \"Rarely, if ever, do you see innovation come from the industry that is under the microscope needing change.\"</p>   <p>In the future we might get health-care services from private TV channels, our cars, or workplace kiosks, he said. Given the character of today’s aging Baby Boomers, Coughlin said he sees health care moving toward personalized service and a more empowered consumer.</p>  <p>And if that sounds like some other industry — such as telecommunications (iPhone) or transportation (GPS) — that’s not likely to surprise systems thinkers. \"The boundaries between these systems are being blurred,\" de Weck said. \"It’s an exciting time to be a systems engineer.\"</p>  <p>The conference was sponsored by SDM, John Deere, MITRE, United Technologies Research Center, and BAE Systems. The 2010 MIT Conference on Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges is scheduled for October 21–22 at MIT.</p> <p>Presentations from the 2009 MIT Conference on Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges can be viewed at   <a href=\"http://sdm.mit.edu/index.php?fileName=conf09/presentations.html\" mce_href=\"http://sdm.mit.edu/index.php?fileName=conf09/presentations.html\" target=\"_blank\">http://sdm.mit.edu/index.php?fileName=conf09/presentations.html</a>.</p>');
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