The Cutting Edge of Energy Innovation: Three Snapshots

Eutectic Liquids for High-Energy Density Flow Batteries

Wind and solar resources are abundant, but intermittent, requiring advanced energy storage options. Flow batteries can offer scalability, long cycle-life, and power-to-energy tunability, however, they have low energy density. In order to achieve high-energy density flow batteries, we employ eutectic mixing properties for the depression of melting points of redox-active organic molecules. Predicting the properties of mixtures of more than two components is not commonly done, but we show that, within some classes of molecules, a regular solution model has predictive power for finding eutectic melting temperatures and compositions for mixtures of multiple components.

Speaker: Antonio Baclig, Stanford

Low-Temperature Restructuring of CeO2-Supported Ruthenium Nanoparticles

Catalytic CO2 reduction to fuels and chemicals is one of the major pursuits in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One such popular approach utilizes the reverse water-gas shift reaction, followed by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. In this talk, I will first demonstrate how a structure of a supported ruthenium catalyst affects its activity and selectivity for CO2 hydrogenation at atmospheric pressure. I will then show how we utilized the obtained knowledge to study formation of hydrocarbons from CO2 by synthesizing well-defined ruthenium-iron oxide heterodimers. We observed that ruthenium promotes reduction of iron oxide via a hydrogen spillover effect. Upon reduction, the heterodimers transformed into core-shell structures, which were active for hydrocarbon formation from CO2. Realizing the important role of the metal encapsulation by iron, our next goal is to encapsulate metal nanoparticles inside porous metal oxides using a nanocasting technique.

Speaker: Aisulu Aitbekova, Stanford

Wind Farm Power Optimization Through Wake Steering

Wake effects within wind farms can significantly decrease the power production and increase the cost of electricity. Herein, we designed a novel wake steering control scheme in order to increase the power production of wind farms. The wake steering method was tested in an array of six utility-scale turbines where it increased the power production for wind speeds near the site annual average between 7% and 13% and decreased variability by up to 72%, for selected wind directions at night. These improvements can contribute to the increasing ability of wind farms to provide reliable, low-cost, and efficient base energy load.

Speaker: Mike Howland , Stanford