freshly funded

3 Texas energy researchers earn early-career grants

Three researchers from Texas are among 93 early career scientists who will receive a collective $135 million in funding for projects lasting up to five years in duration. Photo via Getty Images

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded funds to three Texas university researchers as part of its 2023 Early Career Research Program.

The researchers from Texas A&M University, University of Houston, and University of North Texas are among 93 early career scientists who will receive a collective $135 million in funding for projects lasting up to five years in duration. The DOE said in a statement that $69 million of those funds will be doled out in Fiscal Year 2023.

The funding is part of the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program which aims to support U.S. scientists during their formative years. Awardees must be an untenured, tenure-track assistant or associate professor at a U.S. academic institution or a full-time employee at a DOE National Laboratory who received a Ph.D. within the past 12 years to receive the funding.

“Supporting America’s scientists and researchers early in their careers will ensure the United States remains at the forefront of scientific discovery,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in a statement. “The funding announced today gives the recipients the resources to find the answers to some of the most complex questions as they establish themselves as experts in their fields.”

This year's Texas researchers were:

  • Youtong Zheng, Assistant Professor Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Houston: Zheng's work focuses on how air pollution in urban communities relates to the intensification of storms, known as the aerosol invigoration effect. This research aims to use the DOE's Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM) to improve the predictability of coastal-urban systems and improve DOE models.
  • Philip Adsley, Assistant Professor Department of Physics & Astronomy and Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University: Adsley looks at the dipole response of nuclei. The research will "develop independent calibration standards for dipole response measurements to validate modern experimental studies and investigate historical experimental discrepancies," according to an abstract. Experiments will be performed at Texas A&M, in Germany and in South Africa.
  • Omar Valsson, Assistant Professor Department of Chemistry at the University of North Texas: Valsson's research considers the polymorphism of molecular crystals. The research looks to develop a free energy sampling method for polymorphic transitions that can be applied to a wide range of molecular crystal systems. The findings have applications in chemistry, materials science, and the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries, according to an abstract.

Since the DOE launched the Early Career Research Program in 2010 it has made 868 awards to university and National Lab researchers.

Earlier this summer the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, announced $100 million in funding for its SCALEUP program at a Rice University event. Joe Zhou, CEO of Houston-based Quidnet Energy, spoke at the event on how the DOE funding benefitted his company.

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A View From HETI

Ahmad Elgazzar, Haotian Wang and Shaoyun Hao were members of a Rice University team that recently published findings on how acid bubbling can improve CO2 reduction systems. Photo courtesy Rice.

In a new study published in the journal Science, a team of Rice University researchers shared findings on how acid bubbles can improve the stability of electrochemical devices that convert carbon dioxide into useful fuels and chemicals.

The team led by Rice associate professor Hoatian Wang addressed an issue in the performance and stability of CO2 reduction systems. The gas flow channels in the systems often clog due to salt buildup, reducing efficiency and causing the devices to fail prematurely after about 80 hours of operation.

“Salt precipitation blocks CO2 transport and floods the gas diffusion electrode, which leads to performance failure,” Wang said in a news release. “This typically happens within a few hundred hours, which is far from commercial viability.”

By using an acid-humidified CO2 technique, the team was able to extend the operational life of a CO2 reduction system more than 50-fold, demonstrating more than 4,500 hours of stable operation in a scaled-up reactor.

The Rice team made a simple swap with a significant impact. Instead of using water to humidify the CO2 gas input into the reactor, the team bubbled the gas through an acid solution such as hydrochloric, formic or acetic acid. This process made more soluble salt formations that did not crystallize or block the channels.

The process has major implications for an emerging green technology known as electrochemical CO2 reduction, or CO2RR, that transforms climate-warming CO2 into products like carbon monoxide, ethylene, or alcohols. The products can be further refined into fuels or feedstocks.

“Using the traditional method of water-humidified CO2 could lead to salt formation in the cathode gas flow channels,” Shaoyun Hao, postdoctoral research associate in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and co-first author, explained in the news release. “We hypothesized — and confirmed — that acid vapor could dissolve the salt and convert the low solubility KHCO3 into salt with higher solubility, thus shifting the solubility balance just enough to avoid clogging without affecting catalyst performance.”

The Rice team believes the work can lead to more scalable CO2 electrolyzers, which is vital if the technology is to be deployed at industrial scales as part of carbon capture and utilization strategies. Since the approach itself is relatively simple, it could lead to a more cost-effective and efficient solution. It also worked well with multiple catalyst types, including zinc oxide, copper oxide and bismuth oxide, which are allo used to target different CO2RR products.

“Our method addresses a long-standing obstacle with a low-cost, easily implementable solution,” Ahmad Elgazzar, co-first author and graduate student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, added in the release. “It’s a step toward making carbon utilization technologies more commercially viable and more sustainable.”

A team led by Wang and in collaboration with researchers from the University of Houston also shared findings on salt precipitation buildup and CO2RR in a recent edition of the journal Nature Energy. Read more here.

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