BES News & Resources

Bio-Inspired Processes for Producing Solar Fuels
Imagine if we could directly convert excess atmospheric CO₂ into energy-rich fuels by leveraging the principles of photosynthesis, the process by which plants and algae use the sun's energy to convert water and CO₂ into the chemical energy of life. Inspired by nature, scientists are designing systems for artificial photosynthetic fuel production. By applying the scientific principles that control photosynthesis, researchers are developing self-assembling components that can integrate the functions of light harvesting and catalysis for fuel production into an operational unit with overall greater efficiencies.

Nanofabrication of New Superconducting Materials

Superconductors can carry larger electrical currents without loss to resistance, which eliminates heat generation. Unlike metallic conductors that increase resistance and get hotter as wire diameter decreases, scientists have discovered superconducting organic chains less than 1 nanometer wide and just four molecular pairs in length. This research exploits diverse nanoscale techniques emerging in labs across the country and paves the way for fabricating new superconducting nanomaterials that can transmit electrical power far more efficiently than conventional cables and devices in the U.S. electric grid.

Simulations for Designing More Efficient Engines
Scientists combined computer modeling and laser-diagnostic tools to achieve a more complete understanding of the complex turbulent flows and chemical reactions in diesel combustion. This basic research led to new methods for simulating engine design that reduced the time and cost of developing a cleaner, more efficient diesel engine. Computational tools for engine design are now being adopted by industry.

Solar Energy Science

Among all energy options, sunlight is the most abundant, clean, and secure. Although enough sunlight strikes Earth each hour to fuel a year's worth of human energy needs, current solar energy technologies provide less than 0.1% of the world's electricity. Fully exploiting this enormous yet undeveloped potential is a grand challenge for energy science. Three key approaches to harvesting the sun's energy involve (1) converting sunlight to electricity in solar cells, (2) mimicking natural photosynthesis to store solar energy in the chemical bonds of fuels, and (3) capturing solar heat to drive electricity generation and chemical reactions. Basic research is needed to make the many solar-based routes for producing electricity, fuel, and heat competitive with the cost, reliability, and performance of fossil fuels. Scientists can improve solar technologies by designing new materials that absorb more of the wavelengths in solar radiation, characterizing the mechanisms that limit solar energy conversion efficiency, and adapting nature's strategies to develop low-cost catalysts and new paradigms for energy conversion.

DOE Energy Innovation Hub for Solar Fuels
With a multidisciplinary team of nearly 200 top scientists and engineers, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), a DOE Energy Innovation Hub, is developing artificial systems that produce fuels from sunlight, water, and CO₂. Building on breakthroughs in nanotechnology, physics, chemistry, and materials science, JCAP researchers are using inexpensive, earth-abundant elements to nanoengineer new light absorbers, membranes, and molecular catalysts for producing fuels such as hydrogen, alcohols, or even gasoline. These new nanomaterials would work together like a multilayer, high-performance fabric that oozes solar fuel. JCAP's ultimate goal is to demonstrate a manufacturable device that produces fuel from the sun 10 times more efficiently than current crops.

Materials in Extreme Environments

Future energy technologies will place increasing demands on materials that can withstand extremes in stress, temperature, pressure, chemical reactivity, radiation flux, and electric or magnetic fields. For example, increasing the efficiency of a coal-fired power plant will require new materials that tolerate higher operating temperatures and pressures, and next-generation nuclear reactors will need to withstand higher radiation flux in corrosive environments. These conditions can weaken chemical bonds and accelerate material aging, leading to reduced performance and eventually failure. With current research and computational capabilities, scientists can study the mechanisms of damage evolution from atomic to macroscopic scales. This research is revealing new strategies for developing self-healing materials or using extreme conditions to turn certain material properties on or off as needed. Beyond energy, these new materials would advance many other important application areas such as national security or industry that also require robust, reliable materials.

Electrical Energy Storage

For grid applications, electricity must be reliably available 24 hours a day. Even second-to-second fluctuations can cause major disruptions that cost billions of dollars annually. New approaches for maximizing energy storage capacity are essential to expanding the use of electric vehicles; bringing solar, wind, and other intermittent renewables to the grid; and effectively managing electricity generation to meet peak demand. Today's energy storage devices-are limited by the performance of their constituent materials. Overcoming these limitations requires understanding the myriad interactions that transfer ions or electrons in these devices and the physical and chemical processes that degrade them. Recent advances in visualizing and building nanostructures are enabling the design of a new generation of devices that dramatically increase charge density and last longer by minimizing degradation from charge-discharge cycles.

Clean and Efficient Combustion

As new transportation fuels derived from oil shale, coal, plant biomass, and other sources become available, development of these future fuels must be coordinated with evolving engine design. Combustion dynamics, turbulent flows, and chemistry are astonishingly complex, with hundreds of different fuel molecules and thousands of possible reactions underlying the release of energy stored in chemical bonds. Researchers are overcoming this complexity with powerful computational modeling. By enabling realistic simulations for testing different fuel formulations in existing and proposed engine designs, these models represent an experimentally validated, predictive capability for combustion. They will accelerate the integrated development of fuel and engine concepts needed to curb emissions and increase engine efficiency by 30% or more.

Superconducting Grid Solutions

As one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century, the U.S. electric grid emerged by connecting isolated local grids largely based on technologies from the 1950s-70s. By 2030, U.S. electricity demand is expected to rise 50% or more with the growing use of electric vehicles-an increase the grid will struggle to meet. One potential new solution to this bottleneck is superconductivity-the loss-free transmission of electrical currents observed in certain materials at very low temperatures. Superconductivity is ultimately a phenomenon determined by electron behavior and molecular properties at scales ranging from a tenth of a nanometer to hundreds of nanometers. By applying today's nanoscale characterization and fabrication tools, scientists can attain the mechanistic understanding needed to design less expensive materials that work at higher temperatures and can carry larger currents over greater distances. Such advances will make the grid smarter and more reliable by automatically adjusting to large fluctuations in demand.

Catalysis for Energy Applications

Chemical transformations are essential for generating fuels and other useful chemical products. As the ultimate enablers of these transformations, catalysts facilitate quicker, less energy intensive conversion of molecules into desired products. Without them, most energy and materials needed for daily life would not exist. Whether extracting chemicals from complex fossil feedstocks or transforming plant biomass or CO₂ into fuels, the catalysts and reactions underlying these processes must be understood at the atomic level where the intricate breaking and forming of chemical bonds occur. This detailed understanding of catalyst structure and performance under technologically realistic conditions provides the foundation needed to design and control the synthesis of more efficient, less expensive catalysts with atom-by-atom precision.

Hydrogen Production, Storage, and Conversion

Another option for attaining a secure energy future is expanding the use of hydrogen-the third most abundant element on Earth's surface. Exploiting hydrogen for diverse energy uses requires new science-based strategies for producing it from fossil fuels, biomass conversion, or the splitting of water; storing it chemically or physically; and converting stored hydrogen to electrical energy and heat at the point of use. A key research need is to understand the atomic and molecular processes that occur at the interface of hydrogen with materials, enabling the discovery and design of new membranes, catalysts, and fuel cells with higher performance and lower costs.

Solid-State Lighting

Traditional sources of artificial light, such as incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, are extremely inefficient because they generate light as a byproduct of indirect processes that produce heat or plasmas. Most energy consumed by incandescent bulbs is lost to heat; only about 5% is used to produce visible light. For fluorescent sources, only about 20% is converted to light. Solid-state lighting (SSL), an emerging technology based on direct electricity-to-light conversion using semiconductor materials, has the potential to generate visible white light at much higher efficiencies, possibly approaching 100%. Developing low-cost, efficient SSL technologies with high color-rendering quality will require detailed understanding of the mechanisms and material properties controlling electron conversion to light rather than heat. Applying the latest nanoscale techniques, researchers can experiment with radical new designs of SSL material at the atomic level and study conversion processes in nanostructures much smaller than the wavelength of light.

Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems

Recent advances in nanoscale research and predictive modeling of complex systems are transforming the science-based development of structural materials, fuels, separation processes, and waste forms for nuclear energy. ln addition to extending the operational lifetime of existing reactors, these advances also support a new generation of nuclear energy systems based on materials that withstand extremes in temperature, radiation, mechanical stress, and corrosive conditions. With a more detailed understanding of the nanoscale phenomena controlling defects in system components, researchers are developing techniques for real-time monitoring of structural integrity in reactors and for recycling nuclear fuels in ways that minimize production of long-lived radioactive waste.

Geosciences for Sequestering Energy Byproducts

Even with a growing energy supply from clean alternatives, fossil fuels will continue to be major energy sources for years to come. Efforts to minimize the environmental impacts of fossil CO₂ emissions and radioactive waste from nuclear energy will increase demand to store these and other energy byproducts deep underground for centuries. Safely sequestering large quantities of these byproducts in rock formations thousands of meters deep requires research to understand and reliably predict and monitor their transport and fate as they alter or interact with fluids, minerals, and microbial life in the subsurface.