NENY received a Regional Tech Hub designation from the Biden-Harris administration and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA). The Tech Hubs program aims to drive regional innovation and job creation by strengthening a region’s capacity to manufacture, commercialize and deploy technology that will advance American competitiveness.

The announcement included a Zoom meeting with White House representatives and campus visit from U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer.

“For months, you could feel the electricity and excitement in Binghamton over the growing battery industry, but today lightning has struck, and I am proud to announce the region has officially won the prestigious federal designation as America’s next battery Tech Hub,” Schumer says. “Binghamton University, its partners, and I have worked hand-in-hand to bring this idea to life, and now the ultimate recognition of the Southern Tier as the home to the future of our nation’s battery innovation has become a reality.”

NENY, one of 31 Tech Hubs, is the only awardee in the battery industry.

“NENY’s designation as an EDA Tech Hub is a momentous day in the history of the University, the coalition, as well across the Southern Tier of New York,” President Harvey Stenger says. “With [this] designation, Binghamton and the region will only grow as global leaders in energy storage solutions and will continue to be a driving force working towards a sustainable and secure energy future.”

The Tech Hubs designation significantly expands the goals and geographical region originally laid out by NENY for the EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) last year. Project areas include broadening the scope from one of regional recovery to advancing the U.S. as a global competitor in the lithium-ion battery space, enlarging the focus from battery cell manufacturing to the entire battery lifecycle and supply chain, and expanding the supported region, core consortium members and external partnerships.

“New Energy New York’s designation as a Tech Hub by the Economic Development Administration (EDA) provides our consortium and wider team with the recognition we need to create a national battery epicenter in the region,” said Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development. “As a federally designated Tech Hub, in addition to other prestigious acknowledgements, including being awarded the Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) grant and becoming a finalist in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Innovation Engines competition, we will be able to build out the battery innovation and manufacturing ecosystem here in Upstate New York and help the nation secure a domestic battery supply chain.”

Standout challenges the NENY Tech Hub designation will address include:

• The speed of innovation and lack of available resources to support domestic battery technology commercialization and market launch
• The development of a prepared and robust workforce to meet the expected job demand
• Fortifying U.S. national and economic security against unstable global battery supply chains.

“The EDA Tech Hub designation will help amplify the current efforts and momentum under New Energy New York, propelling our region towards becoming a nation-leading energy storage innovation ecosystem,” says Olga Petrova, director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships.

The NENY consortium includes the Office of the Broome County Executive, Broome-Tioga Workforce, C4V and iM3-NY, the Community Foundation for South Central New York, Cornell University, Electrovaya, FuzeHub, IncubatorWorks, Intertek, NY-BEST, Raymond Corp., Rochester Institute of Technology, the Southern Tier 8 Regional Board, SUNY Broome Community College, The Agency (Broome County IDA), the Research Foundation for SUNY and Three Rivers Development Corp. Additional Hub partners include organizations representing New York State, economic development, workforce development and equity, industry, trade, manufacturing, start-ups, and more.

“I am so heartened to see how our University’s and region’s focus on batteries and energy storage solutions – something I’ve dedicated my entire professional life to – has achieved this level of attention and support from our federal government,” says Stan Whittingham, distinguished professor and Nobel laureate. “Thank you, Senator Schumer, for your vision and unwavering advocacy. This Tech Hub designation is just what is needed to take our coalition’s work to the next level and beyond. I am confident we will become the clean energy hub for the United States.”

The U.S. battery manufacturing industry relies on often-unstable global supply chains. NENY is focused on strengthening the domestic supply chain and lessening innovation losses. One way to bring manufacturing back to the United States is to expand prototyping and pilot testing infrastructure, which will be available at NENY’s Battery-NY Technology and Manufacturing Development Center. The planned Battery-NY facility is a stand-out initiative of NENY’s overall goal to establish the U.S. as a global leader in battery innovation and manufacturing, with the Tech Hub designation supporting further key infrastructure expansions.

“I created the Tech Hubs program in my CHIPS & Science Bill, always with Upstate New York in mind, because I knew with federal investment we could write a new chapter for Upstate New York,” Schumer says. “With Tech Hubs, we can breathe new life into our cities with the industries of the future. And nowhere is that more true than in Binghamton.”

In conjunction with the announcement, the Department of Commerce is launching a second Tech Hubs Notice of Funding Opportunity, which allows NENY and other designated Tech Hubs to apply to receive between $40-$70 million each for implementation funding, totaling around $500 million.

“The designation of an EDA Tech Hub will ignite synergies sparked under New Energy New York between technology and industry and cast a transformative light on workforce development by cultivating an ecosystem where skills flourish, careers thrive and the future of the battery industry gleams with unprecedented potential,” says Stacey Johnson, director of workforce development for NENY.

Dylan Richmond, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Materials Science and Engineering Program, conducts research focused on identifying innovative materials and processes to produce reliable, low-cost, low-waste flexible electronic devices. His research group prints and builds circuits onto adaptable plastic materials.

“My favorite part of this work is definitely printing the materials and making something go from a design to an actual circuit and then building upon that and making the whole device,” Richmond says.

He has worked with Binghamton’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing, or CAMM lab, for two and a half years. The laboratory is directed by Mark Poliks, a SUNY distinguished professor of systems science and industrial engineering. Richmond works alongside Poliks on several projects.

“Dylan is a highly motivated individual who is always willing to accept new and challenging responsibilities,” Poliks says. “It has been my privilege to see him develop into an independent professional scientist.”

The CAMM produces devices that are made to withstand high temperatures and large influxes of energy. They can flex onto virtually any curved surface seamlessly, all while adopting the flexibility of a Band-Aid.

In traditional electronics manufacturing, copper or another conductive metal coats the entire plate and excess materials are etched away to leave behind the circuit. However, the CAMM focuses on printing through additive manufacturing. This process reduces waste and is a cost-effective alternative.

“In additive manufacturing, you only print what you need,” Richmond says. “So you print just the design of the circuit.”

While growing up in Owego, Richmond favored the complex nature of math and science over all other elementary subjects. His initial curiosity and appreciation ultimately paved the way for his future as an engineer.

During his final year at SUNY Oswego, where he received his bachelor’s in physics, Richmond had an opportunity to conduct research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on perovskite solar cells. Perovskite is a low-cost, high-energy material that can be used to power electronic devices.

Flexible hybrid electronics combine printed electronic circuits and the flexibility of plastic materials with the efficiency of thinned semiconductor devices to produce a new form of electronics.

“Flexible electronics should be able to adapt to locations and environments where they are needed. The key word here is adapting,” Richmond says. “You want them to not be a nuisance to you. You want to barely notice that they’re on you. So the challenge is making them so thin, so light-weight, so that you barely notice that you’re wearing them and they’re not getting in the way of your daily activities.”

Printed electronics are still novel and fundamental work still needs to be done. As the field of materials science gains more traction, Richmond says that he is less interested in competition and more interested in sharing his knowledge with like-minded peers in the engineering community.

“There’s a lot of people that are interested in this right now, and I just want to contribute to it,” he says.

The influence of the Green Revolution has motivated Richmond to hope for a future in the renewable energy sector. He aspires to combine his knowledge and experience in materials science with his passion for printing and green energy, to create his own renewable energy company in the future.

“Many of our projects involve collaboration with colleagues at major corporations and other universities,” Poliks says. “Dylan has had the opportunity to develop the skills needed to work in a complex team environment. As a result he is now well prepared to work in a highly competitive research and development laboratory.”

In a news conference held this morning, President Joe Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo spoke directly to the 21 grant recipients, including the New Energy New York leadership team.

“I applaud every community that received the grant and those that applied. You’re the reason I’m so optimistic about the future. There are nothing but possibilities here,” said Biden.

“We designed this challenge to invest $1 billion to create jobs and opportunities for people in places where they live and where they have worked their entire careers, so they don’t have to leave. This is for them,” Biden said. “We estimate that these grants will result in 100,000 jobs created or saved in these communities. Together these projects will uplift underserved communities.”

“The New Energy New York team has worked hard on this project and without the leadership and guidance from Sen. Schumer from the beginning, we do not believe we would be here today,” said Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger. “Distinguished Professor and Nobel Prize-winner Stan Whittingham and our Associate Vice President Per Stromhaug had an idea they believed was crucial to our nation’s energy security. They, along with their team and NENY coalition members, have carried the concept to this point where we can stand here today as winners of the EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge. With this win, and with the tremendous financial support from New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul, we are confident we can turn the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes regions of New York into the national hub for battery innovation, manufacturing and workforce development.”

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer advocated for the project, which had previously been announced as a finalist in the American Rescue Plan’s EDA Regional Challenge.

“I am proud to deliver this once-in-a-generation investment for Binghamton University to the Southern Tier, America’s home for the future of battery innovation, bringing manufacturing back from overseas, and training thousands of workers for good-paying jobs building an industry that will define this century,” Schumer said. “Broome County was once the global home to innovation, as the birthplace of IBM, flight simulation and virtual reality, and this project will breathe new life into that legacy to reinvigorate the Southern Tier economy and show the world what I have long known, that Binghamton workers can be the ones to rebuild our economy and take us into the future.”

“I want to congratulate Binghamton University on securing this important funding through the Biden administration’s Build Back Better initiative,” Hochul said. “Combined with our multi-million-dollar state investment, this funding will help Binghamton University to establish this state-of-the-art facility, advancing critical research and bolstering my administration’s commitment to renewable energy, creating a cleaner, more resilient future for all New Yorkers.”

Binghamton University will develop a battery technology and manufacturing center in an Opportunity Zone in Endicott. Additional projects will support the battery industry and its supply chain. The entire initiative is expected to have a $2 billion economic impact.

“This will enable North America to develop batteries rather than sending our technology overseas,” said Whittingham, an inventor of the lithium-ion battery who helped lead the proposal’s development. “We can’t have a supply chain dominated by any one part of the world. We can have batteries that have ‘Made in America’ stamped on them. I’m excited to spearhead the prototype facility in Endicott. We have built a coalition with industry partners so we have plans that are already informed by companies’ needs.”

Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development at Binghamton University, will serve as regional economic competitiveness officer overseeing this project. He noted that the team consulted with more than 50 companies from every part of the battery supply chain in developing the proposal.

“Everyone we talked to has seen the importance of the project and been excited about being part of it,” Stromhaug said. “We are ready to have programs up and running quickly, with the Endicott pilot manufacturing facility open in a year or two. The program will be a magnet for the region and upstate New York, leading to high-paying jobs in development and manufacturing. It’s going to make an impact nationally.”

“The Build Back Better Regional Challenge will help fund an exciting pivot towards a clean energy future, while revitalizing and restoring a community back its thriving manufacturing roots,” Raimondo said. “The New Energy New York coalition will leverage recent private investment in the state and Binghamton University’s research strengths — boosting U.S. global competitiveness and creating new jobs.”

The project includes regional workforce development required to support the storage manufacturing ecosystem, with dedicated programs to promote equity and participation of individuals from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds.

Olga Petrova, assistant director of Binghamton University’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships, will serve as deputy regional economic competitiveness officer on the project.

“This funding from the EDA is a unique opportunity for comprehensive ecosystem building,” she said. “We will make a difference not only when it comes to technology development and manufacturing, but this will also benefit our region and its residents as a whole. We have already engaged community and local government and grassroots organizations in designing the projects. And we look forward to working with them to create jobs and workforce training programs, and to empowering our residents from various backgrounds to take advantage of these new opportunities.

William P. Acker, executive director of the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), said the New Energy New York project will strengthen the state’s robust ecosystem for batteries and energy storage technologies.

“Through the New Energy New York program, we will establish valuable new facilities, including a new Battery-NY Center, to support large-scale battery prototyping and manufacturing of new innovative ‘leapfrogging’ battery technologies,” Acker said. “We will also grow and develop the domestic supply chain and workforce needed to ensure that New York State and the nation are positioned to meet the growing domestic need for batteries. The New Energy New York project will be instrumental in driving job creation, economic growth and equity and justice from the rapidly expanding global battery industry.”

“This funding represents a significant investment in an innovative collaboration between the world-class researchers at Binghamton University and partners in the Southern Tier’s technology ecosystem,” U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said. “As I wrote to Secretary Raimondo in March, this funding will strengthen domestic supply chains and reduce the outsourcing of battery production to international companies.”

New Energy New York includes more than a dozen partners: academic institutions Binghamton University, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Broome Community College and SUNY Corning Community College; nonprofits New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), Research Foundation for SUNY, Incubator Works, Southern Door Community Land Trust, AM&T and The Clean Fight NY; and government representation from New York State Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), Empire State Development Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (ESD NYSTAR) and Broome County.

Doreen M. Harris, president and CEO of NYSERDA, noted that energy storage plays a central role in the integration of more renewable energy onto the grid. “This historic investment will support the workers and domestic supply chain needed to keep the Empire State leading America’s critical energy storage industry,” she said, “and NYSERDA is proud to collaborate with the University and its partners to capitalize on the opportunity before us.”

Assemblymember Donna Lupardo said, “I would like to sincerely thank the NENY team and all our government partners for bringing this project to fruition. This award will be a game-changer for the university, our local economy, and for our clean energy future. This is exactly what we hoped would happen when the Innovative Technologies Complex was first proposed many years ago.”

Noting that the Build Back Better application was one of the most difficult and time-consuming applications he had ever seen, Broome County Executive Jason Garner said that the stars have aligned. “We know how to work together as a community to get the things that we need,” he said. “This amazing team got this done and it’s going to change Broome County. This is probably one of the most impactful things that have happened here.”

Shailesh Upreti, CEO of C4V and chairman for the iM3NY Gigafactory in Endicott, welcomed the news. “The New Energy New York coalition will catalyze all our investment so far in the state towards domestic manufacturing and complement Binghamton University’s cutting-edge research capabilities to boost American competitiveness in the battery supply chain and help create new green jobs,” he said.

The award opens up two opportunities to the University, says U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who advocated for the proposal. It provides $500,000 in technical assistance funding that the University will use to develop its proposal to turn the Southern Tier into an energy technology hub. It also allows the University to compete in Phase 2 of the challenge.

“This award will make the New Energy NY project eligible for up to $100 million in federal funding to transform the Greater Binghamton area and broader upstate New York region, create thousands of jobs, fuel the innovation necessary to combat climate change, and importantly, strengthen a critical area of the U.S. domestic manufacturing supply chain,” Schumer says. “I am proud to have fought for the New Energy NY project to be selected for Phase 1 and I will continue to fight tooth and nail to secure the final award and supercharge this growing area of the Upstate New York economy.”

This initiative will not only create jobs and improve the regional economy; it’s also crucial to our nation’s energy goals and energy security efforts, says chemist M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University distinguished professor and 2019 Nobel laureate.

“Our NENY proposal can turn our region into an energy technology hub that has the potential to turn out advancements that will have national and global impacts,” Whittingham says.

With the appropriate support, Binghamton can become a national hub for battery innovation, manufacturing and workforce development, University President Harvey Stenger said. “We thank Sen. Schumer for his support on this as well as all that he does for our University and we thank the EDA for understanding and supporting our vision and providing us the necessary resources to move this forward,” he said.

The University has a track record of successful collaborations with industry partners, says Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton. “We’re fortunate to have an experienced, well-respected innovator like Stan leading the way and pushing our region and our country to take bold action for a more environmentally friendly future,” Sammakia says.

Binghamton was chosen by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) for the project, which will bring together the University, SUNY Broome Community College, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY-BEST and others to develop a proposal for Phase 2 of the competition. The proposal will focus on expanding research, development, testing and workforce assets to meet the demand of the emerging battery manufacturing industry in the Southern Tier and upstate New York.

“Binghamton University is honored and excited to lead a coalition of premier organizations from across New York State to help the U.S. meet the critical and growing demand for domestic battery products,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships and regional economic competitive officer for the project.

If fully funded, the project estimates that as many as 8,000 jobs would be created during a 10-year period.

Schumer said that the Build Back Better Regional Challenge received 529 Phase 1 applications from across the United States, and the New Energy NY project was one of 60 proposals selected as a Phase 1 awardee.

In Phase 2, the EDA will award 20 to 30 regional coalitions $25 million to $75 million, and up to $100 million, for projects to grow new regional industry clusters or scale existing ones through planning, infrastructure, innovation and entrepreneurship, workforce development, access to capital and more.

Zili Yang’s monograph, titled “The Environment and Externality: Theory, Algorithms and Applications,” was published in December by Cambridge University Press.

“If we don’t cooperate, if each individual strives for their own interest, collectively we create an economy with uncontrolled pollution,” says Yang, a professor of economics who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2002. “If we cooperate, pollution can be controlled efficiently.”

Some ideas in the book are inspired by the RICE model (Regional Integrated Climate-Economy model) made famous by William Nordhaus. The 2018 Nobel laureate was Yang’s doctoral adviser at Yale University.

Think of the global economy as a cake to be shared among countries. It can be sliced in various ways. Right now, some slices are very large and others are quite thin. As economists think about ways to address climate change and reduce pollution, few if any countries are willing to go away from the table with a smaller piece of that cake.

Yang wants to find a way to divide the cake as fairly as possible. This cutting method is at the core of his work.

Yang begins the new book with a brief discussion of the concept of externality. When some people’s or countries’ welfares are affected by others’ activities without their explicit consent, then externality exists, he writes.

This is a core challenge of environmental economics. Why? Because all pollution hurts people. It may not harm you personally, but it’s hurting someone.

When people, countries or regions cooperate, they internalize this externality. The cake gets bigger, so to speak, but when it’s sliced some countries may still walk away with less than they had before.

“Most times it’s politically infeasible,” Yang says.

His goal? Come up with a cutting method where every country gets a larger slice of the new, larger cake.

The method many economists employ basically says we sum up all agents or countries to form a social welfare function (so 15 countries equals 15). Countries are treated as equals, whether they’re small or large and whether the climate impacts they face are significant or minimal.

“The ‘equal’ way is not fair,” Yang says.

Yang doesn’t think that Fiji and the United States should be weighted equally, for example. He would say 15 countries equals n; if you’re more significantly affected, you should be expected to do more to fix the problem. Likewise, if a country is responsible for more emissions, it should be responsible for more mitigation costs.

His method recognizes that countries have to see how their circumstances will be improved. “You can’t force people to collaborate if it makes them worse off than when they weren’t cooperating,” he says.

Yang is also the author of “Strategic Bargaining and Cooperation in Greenhouse Gas Mitigations,” published in 2008 by MIT Press.

In his earlier work, Yang worked with the RICE model to “cut the cake” fairly. What he came up with took months of trial and error.

In the new monograph, he outlines an algorithm that makes an accurate cut on the first attempt, no trial and error required. He says the outcome and its elegance surprised him.

“I apply the theory and try to tell non-economists about it so it can be useful in policy,” Yang says. “My conclusion is unique.”

Other methods rely on a second round of “cake cutting” to ensure greater fairness. Yang attempts to build in that fairness to start, then executes just one round of cutting. Most models accommodate three regions; his allows many more.

Some of Yang’s thinking is also based on understandings of bargaining that come from the work of Nobel laureate John Nash. In the early 1950s, Nash articulated the strategic interactions possible between two or more decision makers.

How do we make sure two people (or countries, or regions) want to cooperate? Yang says you have to ensure that both are better off if they work together than if they do not.

This is one reason that Yang is somewhat critical of the Paris climate accords; he thinks they don’t call for enough cooperation. The climate targets are too rigid, and countries’ actions are too independent, he says.

Yang hopes the ideas in his new book will be put to practical use. He provides all the algorithms so others can check his work, and the publisher will make a paperback copy available for sale, which may make it appealing as a textbook.

Jon M. Conrad, professor of resource economics at Cornell University, says the book will become an essential text for graduate-level courses in environmental economics. “Yang does a masterful job of determining the optimal level of externality in both static and dynamic models under cooperative, non-cooperative and coalitional solutions,” he wrote in a review of the book.

Yang sees himself as a scientist out to challenge established ways of thinking.

“You have to be skeptical,” he notes. “I don’t necessarily accept established results without questioning them. You want to find something other people haven’t noticed.”

Whittingham won the prize for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery along with John B. Goodenough, Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and Akira Yoshino of Meijo University in Japan.

“I am overcome with gratitude at receiving this award, and I honestly have so many people to thank I don’t know where to begin,” Whittingham says. “The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a foundational level, and it is my hope that this recognition will help to shine a much-needed light on the nation’s energy future.”

Whittingham came to Binghamton University in 1988 after 16 years at Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he received the patent for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and Schlumberger-Doll Research. In his 30-plus year career, he has been a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries. He holds the original patent on the concept of the use of intercalation chemistry in high-power density, highly reversible lithium batteries — work that provided the basis for subsequent discoveries that now power most laptop computers.

With more than 200 publications in some of the leading scholarly journals and 16 patents, Whittingham has earned a national and international reputation as a prolific scientist. His research in the area of synthesis and characterization of novel transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion, separations or as sensors has been continuously supported since his arrival in Binghamton, with over $7 million in federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Whittingham also helped to establish Binghamton’s Materials Science and Engineering Program, bringing his creativity and innovation to the University’s graduate curriculum as well as to its laboratories.

Whittingham and his research group emphasize novel approaches to synthesis at ambient temperature, which often allows structures to be formed that are unstable under the high temperatures normally used for preparing oxides. He serves as director of the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, an Energy Frontier Research Center that’s also part of Binghamton’s New York State Center of Excellence.

“Binghamton is very proud that the Nobel committee has chosen to award Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham with the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on lithium-ion batteries,” University President Harvey Stenger says. “Professor Whittingham’s work has fundamentally changed the way the world stores and utilizes energy, making possible a revolution in consumer and industrial technologies. For nearly 30 years, Professor Whittingham has been one of the most visible and productive researchers at the University, and all of us at Binghamton congratulate him on this great honor.”

Whittingham has been recognized by his peers with two major awards in recent years. In 2002, he received the Battery Research Award of the Electrochemical Society for his many contributions to “Intercalation Chemistry and Battery Materials,” and two years later he was elected a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.

He has also participated and held leadership positions in the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Electrochemical Society and the Materials Research Society; and served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Chemistry of Materials and the Materials Research Bulletin. He was also the founder and principal editor of the journal Solid State Ionics — one of the two major journals in the field.

Whittingham earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University before coming to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.

He is the State University of New York’s 16th Nobel laureate.

Coverage of this exciting story:

Forbes on the science behind this year’s chemistry prize

The Washington Post on Whittingham and his fellow award-winners

The New York Times on the sequence of events that led to the battery breakthrough

“This opportunity is one I didn’t envision even five years ago,” says Louis Piper, associate professor of physics at Binghamton and the principal investigator for the grant, awarded last week. “We didn’t think it would be possible.”

The instrument, a HArd X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy system (or HAXPES), allows researchers to get detailed information about a device or material without taking it apart.

HAXPES relies on the photoelectric effect, one of the most important tools in condensed matter physics and in materials science (and the basis for Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize). The machine shines light (in this case hard X-rays) into a material. The material accepts the energy and momentum and kicks out electrons. Conservation of energy and momentum allows researchers to determine the chemical and electronic structure of the material being studied.

This is the kind of energy you’d use for a chest X-ray at the hospital, Piper explains. And HAXPES will let him study a device like a battery in a way that leaves the battery intact, just like your doctor wouldn’t remove your rib cage for that chest X-ray.

“We can see what we previously couldn’t see,” Piper says.

That’s because other techniques are surface-senstitive. They’re good at scanning the outer layer of a device, but don’t offer a view of what’s inside. It would be like looking at a ham and cheese sandwich but only seeing the outermost crumbs on the bread. “It might not be a good representation of the material or what the material is like when it’s in contact with other materials,” Piper notes.

HAXPES requires a powerful source of X-rays and an extremely sensitive detector. The techniques associated with it have been used for about a decade, but previously were only possible with a synchrotron — a kind of particle accelerator that generates X-rays. At those facilities, visiting scientists typically conduct experiments over a period of hours and then leave.

HAXPES will provide synchrotron-comparable data in a laboratory setting, which makes it much more forgiving in terms of time and much more useful for private industry.

Compared to similar instruments, HAXPES offers more kinetic energy, which means excited electrons have a greater chance of escaping from deeper within the solid. That increases the tool’s sensitivity to the bulk of a material being examined. “Bulk” is a relative term in this case; HAXPES may go 60 nanometers deep into a material vs. 5 nanometers with other tools.

Still, at 60 nanometers, scientists will be able to access interfaces of real devices such as transistors. They’ll be able to measure energy levels and the chemical composition of buried interfaces without tearing them apart.

Piper, who is also the director of the Institute for Materials Research at Binghamton, says the new equipment dovetails with the campus’ industry-level capabilities. “We want to have unique tools that can act as a bridge between computational modeling and real-world applications,” he says.

The HAXPES, made by European company Scienta-Omicron, should be ready for use within two years at Binghamton’s Smart Energy R&D Building, part of the Innovative Technologies Complex.

The campus has a long history of industry partnerships and of creating multiuser laboratories to benefit academic and private R&D. The HAXPES should extend those collaborations in exciting ways, notes Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and director of S3IP, a New York State Center of Excellence focused on electronics packaging research. “Equipment like this adds to our unique capabilities at Binghamton and brings value to our relationships with major technology companies and startups alike,” Sammakia says. “Louis is a national leader in this area, and I am eager to see what he can accomplish with HAXPES on campus.”

The HAXPES is about the size of a pickup truck, and Piper notes that the Binghamton tool will have several upgrades. “I consider it the Cadillac of HAXPES instruments,” he says.

That is, if a Cadillac could generate hard and soft X-rays and take low-temperature measurements as well as high-temperature measurements.

The instrument will have four key areas of focus:

• Batteries
• Next-generation electronics
• Neuromorphic computing
• Solar energy harvesting

In addition, researchers in the humanities may use the HAXPES’ small vacuum chamber to study pigments and clays. The tool will tie into Binghamton’s Materials Matter course, an interdisciplinary class that brings principles of science to life for humanities students and future scientists alike.

Piper sees the lab-based HAXPES enabling him and his colleagues to continue developing ways to describe chemical concepts to students from other disciplines.

He says he’s already seen firsthand how HAXPES could change materials research, as the technique allowed researchers to observe how electrons degrade and how that effects batteries’ performance.

“At Binghamton, we solve industry-relevant problems,” Piper says. “Photoemission has long been a powerful technique for materials studies, but has been largely been limited to sterile, perfect crystals. This instrument is very flexible and means we can measure real materials and devices even while they’re in operation. This tool means we’ll be able to make significant contributions in smart energy technologies.”

The battery combusted because of a phenomenon called “thermal runaway.” When the battery is heated to a certain temperature, a reaction occurs and causes the battery to generate heat, until eventually it decomposes.

Luckily, this situation virtually never happens, and that’s because of people like Carrie Kaplan. Kaplan, a fourth-year graduate student in chemistry at Binghamton University, is part of Battery 500, a project aimed at developing next-generation batteries with higher energy capacity. It’s her job to make sure these batteries are stable.

Thermal runaway issues were the cause of Boeing 787 fires that happened in recent years. These issues typically arise when batteries have a larger energy capacity.

“As you increase the energy level, the safety goes down,” says M. Stanley Whittingham, director of Binghamton’s Northeast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) and Kaplan’s advisor. “So you have this tradeoff between storage and safety.”

Kaplan studies thermal stability and searches for unwanted side reactions that may lead to decomposition. Using a differential scanning calorimeter, she increases the temperature of batteries and looks at changes in heat release.

If there is a high amount of heat released at a particular temperature, it indicates an unwanted reaction is occurring. That’s fine if the temperature, called the onset temperature, is high and relatively unreachable in a typical setting.

If the onset temperature is low, however, say 150°C, that’s a concern. That’s a temperature that can be feasibly reached, especially if the battery is in a car sitting on asphalt during a hot Arizona day.

Finding out what causes this decomposition is the challenge in Kaplan’s work. She is always moving around departments and using different technologies to understand what issues might arise.

“Is it because they’re organic? Is it because of the salt? Is it because of our material?” Kaplan wonders. “There’s a lot of different things that it could be, and we have to do further analysis to understand what exactly is happening.”

Kaplan, who’s from Ashburn, Virginia, did not expect to end up in battery work. At the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, she changed her major five times before ending up in chemistry because of an enthusiastic teacher.

“I took her class and knew that I was meant to do this,” Kaplan says. “She was so carefree. She would do these experiments in class, and I cannot count the amount of times she set the classroom on fire.”

While contemplating graduate school, Kaplan found out about the battery research at Binghamton, and she reached out to Whittingham.

“She’s a nice, easy person to work with, and a very good student,” Whittingham says.

Kaplan won the Lois D. Mackey Award, which goes to an outstanding first-year teaching assistant in general chemistry, and she received the Provost’s Doctoral Fellowship in the summers of 2017 and 2018. Now, she is the “safety and side reaction expert” for Battery 500.

He works with the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), a network of professors, research scientists, post-docs and graduate students who aim to improve energy storage, focusing primarily on lithium-ion batteries.

These batteries power everyday portable devices such as cell phones and laptops as well as some cars.

They retain and transmit their power by cycling lithium ions (Li+) in and out of certain materials. Stan Whittingham, director of NECCES and Hidalgo’s advisor, says batteries can barely cycle one unit of Li+ at a time.

The compound Hidalgo and his colleagues are studying, called vanadium phosphate, is capable of cycling up to two. “The idea here is that the more lithium you can put in or remove, the more energy you can get out,” Hidalgo says.

To figure out what yields the best battery, Hidalgo and his colleagues tackle the compound from different perspectives.

“It’s almost like cooking. Depending on the pressure, depending on what I put inside, the products will be different, so usually I change something small, the pH, the concentration, the pressure, and the product will be completely different,” Hidalgo says. “If the material is what we want it to be, then we use it in a battery, we cycle it, and this process repeats.”

Hidalgo and his colleagues have successfully synthesized a battery that can cycle two lithium ions, and now they are moving on to develop batteries that can cycle more. “[Now] we’re looking at materials that have more than just one vanadium; the one I’m looking at now has 4, and so maybe we could have up to 8 lithium ions [cycled at a time],” Hidalgo says.

Hidalgo, who was born in Japan, moved to the Philippines when he was 7 years old. There, he completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry and materials science and engineering. He received a scholarship to complete a professional science master’s certificate at Binghamton, which trains students in business alongside their science degrees.

“For my scholarship, the idea is that the government will bring people here from other countries to study, and then for those people to bring what they learned back to their countries,” Hidalgo says. “Once I graduate, my plans are to go back home, work for a bit and see what my opportunities are.”

Hidalgo, who did research on solar cells as an undergraduate, says he plans to continue down the energy research path after he completes his graduate work in materials science and engineering.

“He could probably snap up any job he wanted,” says Whittingham, one of the inventors of the lithium-ion battery. “He’s got this natural leadership built into him. He’s enthusiastic; he goes and gets things done.”

Whittingham is one of 83 new members and 16 foreign members announced, bringing the academy’s total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262. He will be inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30.

Membership in the National Academy of Engineering honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

“Binghamton is very proud that the National Academy of Engineering has chosen to elect Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham to its ranks,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger said. “Professor Whittingham’s work has fundamentally changed the way the world stores and utilizes energy, making possible a revolution in consumer and industrial technologies. For nearly 30 years, Professor Whittingham has been one of the most visible and productive researchers at the University, and all of us at Binghamton congratulate him on this great honor.”

Whittingham, distinguished professor of chemistry and materials science at Binghamton University, joined the faculty in 1988 after 16 years at Schlumberger-Doll Research and Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he received the patent for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

He has been a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries. He holds the original patent on the concept of the use of intercalation chemistry in high-power density, highly reversible lithium batteries – work that provided the basis for subsequent discoveries that now power most laptop computers.

“It is a great honor to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering,” Whittingham said. “The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a foundational level, and it is my hope that this recognition will help to shine a much-needed light on the nation’s energy future.”

With 16 patents and more than 300 publications in leading scholarly journals, Whittingham has earned a national and international reputation as a prolific scientist. His research in the area of synthesis and characterization of novel transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion, separations or as sensors has been continuously supported since his arrival in Binghamton, with over $7 million in federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. He now directs the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, an Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Whittingham helped to establish the Materials Science and Engineering Program, bringing his creativity and innovation to Binghamton’s graduate curriculum as well as to its laboratories.

Working a great deal with ambient temperature, he and his research group emphasize novel approaches to synthesis that often allow structures to be formed that are unstable under the high temperatures normally used for preparing oxides.

Whittingham has been recognized by his peers with two major awards in recent years. In 2002, he was honored with the Battery Research Award of the Electrochemical Society for his many contributions to “Intercalation Chemistry and Battery Materials.” Two years later, he was elected a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.

He has also been active in the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Electrochemical Society, and the Materials Research Society; and served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Chemistry of Materials and the Materials Research Bulletin. He was also the founder and principle editor of the journal Solid State Ionics, one of the two major journals in the field.

Whittingham earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University, before coming to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.

Tara P. Dhakal, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded a five-year, $500,000 NSF CAREER grant for his study “Toward Twenty Year Lifetime: Hermetic Sealing for Perovskite Solar Cells.” The proposal was one of just 11 to be funded in a field of 150 proposals.

“Most solar cells are made from silicon and, while those solar cells are highly efficient, they have their limitations,” says Dhakal, who also serves as interim director of Binghamton’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power.

His work focuses on solar cells made with perovskite, a crystalline mineral found in nature that has shown the potential to create solar cells that are just as efficient as the silicon-based type.

“Unfortunately, the current versions of perovskite solar cells are typically fabricated with toxic lead,” Dhakal says. He wants to replace lead with non-toxic germanium.

“Germanium and lead both come from column 14 on the periodic table,” Dhakal says. “Other researchers have tried, without success, to use tin for the same reason but I’ve found evidence that germanium has a better chance of success.”

If he is able to replace the lead in the perovskite solar cells, they could prove to be more environmentally friendly than other solar cells.

However, even with the lead removed, there is another issue that could prevent perovskite solar cells from being deployed for an extended period of time.

That’s why Dhakal’s study will also be looking at ways to make perovskite solar cells last longer.

“Lead perovskite solar cells have only lasted for several months under ideal laboratory conditions,” he says. “With my proposed sealing techniques, I predict that module lifetimes could be greater than 20 years.”

With Dhakal’s seal on the perovskite solar cells, they could have the same shelf life that silicon solar cells do. Without lead and with this sealing, the cells will become more practical for use — which Dhakal says will facilitate a wider reach for solar power.

“Silicon makes a robust solar cell but one thing it misses is flexibility,” he says. “The perovskite solar cells could be made on fabrics or plastics, which would make solar power much more accessible.”

Dhakal, who did his undergraduate work in Nepal, came to Binghamton as a research scientist in 2010 after earning a doctorate at the University of Florida.

Seokheun “Sean” Choi and two of his students developed the device, a microbial fuel cell that runs on the bacteria available in a few drops of dirty water. They report on their invention in a new paper published online in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Choi previously developed a paper-based origami battery. The first design, shaped like a matchbook, stacked four modules together. The ninja star version, which measures about 2.5 inches wide, boasts increased power and voltage, with eight small batteries connected in series.

“Last time, it was a proof of concept. The power density was in the nanowatt range,” says Choi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “This time, we increased it to the microwatt range. We can light an LED for about 20 minutes or power other types of biosensors.”

Paper-based biosensors include pregnancy tests and HIV tests. The sensitivity of such tests is limited, Choi says, and a battery like his could allow the use of more sophisticated fluorescent or electrochemical biosensors in developing countries. “Commercially available batteries are too wasteful and expensive for the field,” he says. “Ultimately, I’d like to develop instant, disposable, accessible bio-batteries for use in resource-limited regions.”

The new design folds into a star with one inlet at its center and the electrical contacts at the points of each side. After a few drops of dirty water are placed into the inlet, the device can be opened into a Frisbee-like ring to allow each of the eight fuel cells to work. Each module is a sandwich of five functional layers with its own anode, proton exchange membrane and air-cathode.

Choi’s original matchbook-sized battery could be produced for about 5 cents. The new ninja star device is more expensive — roughly 70 cents — in part because it uses not only filter paper but also carbon cloth for the anode as well as copper tape. The team’s next goal is to produce a fully paper-based device that has the power density of the new design and a lower price tag.

Choi prides himself on involving students in his research, and this paper represents a special triumph for co-author Landen Kwan, who worked on the project during a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at Binghamton in the summer of 2015. Kwan, then a student at Queensborough Community College, is now enrolled at Stony Brook University. Binghamton doctoral student Arwa Fraiwan also contributed to the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Jeffrey Mativetsky, assistant professor of physics, will receive more than $525,000 over five years for the work, which is to begin in July 2016. His research centers on the relationships between nanoscale structure and electrical function in organic materials for solar cells and electronics.

“One of the main things holding back the use of solar cells is the cost associated with them,” he says. “Organic solar cells provide a pathway toward low-cost, clean energy. Organic materials open new possibilities because they are lightweight and mechanically flexible, making it possible, for example, to integrate them into curved surfaces.”

Organic materials can also be processed near room temperature, Mativetsky notes, which is another factor that makes them attractive for flexible electronics.

Mativetsky, who blends principles of physics, chemistry and engineering in his research, says he’s motivated by a desire to work on systems that are relevant to society. He’d like to see solar cells integrated into disaster relief tents, for instance.

In his laboratory, students work at a 16-foot-long, nitrogen-filled glovebox as vacuum pumps vibrate and several solutions swirl in vials on a countertop stir plate. The glovebox maintains an environment a bit above atmospheric pressure, with less than 1 part per million of oxygen and humidity. Mativetsky has two atomic force microscopes, and his team uses additional equipment at Binghamton’s Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory.

Mativetsky received seed funding through Binghamton’s Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence program, which encourages work across multiple fields of inquiry and counts smart energy as a special area of interest. The preliminary results obtained by Mativetsky with fellow Binghamton physicist Joon Jang and chemist Alistair Lees provided a foundation for the NSF proposal. “We made it to the start line,” Mativetsky says. “Now we can do the research we set out to do.”

The core of that research will focus on molecule-based nanowires, filaments that are far, far thinner than a human hair and which often have special properties not found in materials at larger scales. Mativetsky is especially interested in how electric charge moves through these nanomaterials.

“We’re investigating the fundamentals of how nanoscale structuring affects charge photogeneration and charge transport,” he says.

Mativetsky believes these nanowires could improve organic solar cell performance and enable the manufacture of flexible solar cells that are thinner than a sheet of paper. Such solar cells might be less efficient than traditional ones made with silicon, he says, but they could produce more energy per gram of material.

Mativetsky, a native of Montreal who earned a doctorate in physics from McGill University in 2006, held post-doctoral fellowships at the Supramolecular Science and Engineering Institute in France and at Princeton University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2012.

He is already the recipient of another $300,000 NSF grant, which supports research into graphene oxide with potential applications in flexible electronics, energy storage, sensors, composite materials and biomedical engineering.

Shawn Sallis wants to know why.

“It’s unclear what’s causing the problem,” says Sallis, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at Binghamton University. “The electrodes start as a powder, which is mixed with a liquid binder to create a paste. That makes it really hard to disentangle exactly what’s going on as the material starts to degrade, and it’s going to require a lot of work to find out.”

To solve the puzzle, Sallis is spending this school year on a prestigious fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif., where he’ll be working with the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a synchrotron that produces a beam a billion times brighter the sun. By bombarding his materials with X-rays, Sallis can observe the electrons as the battery charges and recharges, and gain a better understanding how the surface and subsurface degrade.

“We need facilities like the one in Berkeley to answer why we’re not reaching the full potential of these materials,” says Louis Piper, an assistant professor of physics who serves as Sallis’ faculty advisor. “They’re not behaving as they should, and we suspect the differences between the surface and the interior of these nanoparticles that make the electrodes is responsible. If we can determine what’s occurring, then we can consider how to overcome the problem. Over the past few years, Shawn has gained a lot of experience, which makes him the natural candidate.”

Since coming to Binghamton in 2010, Sallis has co-authored 17 published papers, presented his work at five national conferences and won an award for Best Poster for the oxide semiconductors symposium at the fall 2012 Meeting of the Materials Research Society. He has already conducted research at ALS, as well as at the National Synchrotron Light Source on Long Island and at Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom.

“It’s very expensive to make the kind of X-rays we need to do this work,” says Sallis, who grew up in rural Cortland County, the son of a nurse and a long-haul truck driver, before graduating from SUNY Cortland in 2010. “Improving batteries is going to be a long, hard process with a lot of incremental steps. So I’m really excited to go back to ALS, where I’ll be able to focus on my research, help other people with their experiments, and see a lot of science I wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world.”

Now the winner of one of America’s most prestigious scholarships, Pereyra plans to spend the summer at the turbine’s base trying to model how waves, currents and water interfere with how wind is turned into energy.

Winning the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship, a $7,500 prize given to 260 undergraduate researchers, is nice, but just a mile marker on the road to something really big: efficient, affordable, green energy.

“We’re hoping to put wind turbines offshore,” said the 20-year-old Binghamton University undergraduate. “The big complication is that rather than a fixed base, it has multiple degrees of freedom.”

Turbine platforms face waves, current, storms and, naturally, the wind. All that can affect the power collected. And as farms crop up, the turbines themselves affect the wind flow to neighboring turbines.

Pereyra won the scholarship — a federal program that honors the late U.S. senator and fosters math, engineering and science advances — based on his academic record and a proposal to research and develop the computational modeling to make turbines more effective.

“I’ve really been pretty passionate about renewable energy since I got here,” said Pereyra, from Westhampton Beach, on Long Island. “I thought about where the problems lie for our society. We’re entirely run off fossil fuels. Why spend resources developing a technology our children are going to struggle to live without?”

His challenge is that much of the existing modeling for wind turbines comes from the offshore oil industry. But the two platforms are very different. Oil rigs are huge and can ignore some forces, higher order wave effects, for example, that would tear a turbine platform apart. Likewise, an oil rig’s size means it must deal with other forces small platforms overcome easily.

Pereyra began learning how to do that during a 2014 internship with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., studying how wind farms are affected, and affect, wind. He’ll continue that work this summer, again with the NREL, dealing with offshore platforms.

“We have to see how that applies to our technology. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t,” he said. The new models he hopes to develop would be both faster and more accurate.

Pereyra’s first steps in fluid dynamics and modeling came in the lab of Bruce Murray, a professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton. While there, Pereyra exhibited one of the most crucial traits of a good researcher, Murray said: curiosity.

“He struggled, but he asked lots of questions and figured things out,” Murray said. “Some kids are really just sharp and motivated. And it’s very rare that students that new get into modeling to that extent.”

Bruce White worked with semiconductors and transistors at Motorola and Texas Instruments. But when he left industry for a position on Binghamton University’s faculty, the materials scientist decided to take his research in a new direction. “I didn’t want to just continue to work on transistors and memory,” White says. “I wanted to try to apply those tools to big problems that impact society.”

Energy is one of those big problems; in the United States, more than half of the energy we burn each year gets lost as heat instead of being put to use.

“We do all this work to get oil out of the ground and to refine it, but when we try to do some work with it, most of the energy goes out the exhaust pipe of a car or out the smokestack of a power plant,” White says. “Even if we could reclaim a small fraction of what we throw away as heat, that would have a significant impact on our energy use.”

There are ways to turn heat into electricity. If a material is hot on one side and cold on the other, the flow of heat from hot to cold can be turned into electricity. But most of the thermoelectric materials on the market today are not very good at doing that. The tricky part, White says, is getting the heat to flow through the material on the backs of electrons. In most materials, the heat flows in a wave that simply makes the material’s atoms vibrate faster. That’s not a useful phenomenon, and it ends up destroying the important hot-cold differential. In many materials, the vibration of atoms carries away 90 percent of the heat before it can be harnessed.

White’s goal is to create materials where the vibrational effects are minimized — or, in other words, where a larger percentage of the heat gets shuttled by electrons, creating a flow of electricity. He also thinks it’s important to make sure those materials are abundant and nontoxic.

White may have found a candidate in zinc oxide, a substance used in many brands of sunblock. Zinc oxide is abundant, cheap and safe, and it happens to be really good at moving electrons around. Unfortunately, in its normal state, zinc oxide has a molecular structure that transports heat by vibrating atoms instead of turning it into electricity.

By manipulating zinc oxide at the molecular level, White and his colleagues are able to make it better at generating electricity. First, they stretch the material into wires that measure 50 nanometers across. (That’s roughly 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.) That incredible thinness changes the way heat spreads through the material. Next, they embed the nanowires in a silica aerogel, a substance that’s terrible at conducting heat. Because of the interesting and unique interactions that occur at very small scales, nanowires can take on the properties of surrounding materials. In this case, the wires became very poor heat conductors. Their ability to conduct heat through atomic vibrations decreased by a factor of 10, so their efficiency in turning heat to electricity shot up. The results were published in April 2013 in Applied Physics Letters, the top journal in the field.

What’s particularly exciting about this discovery, White says, is that the materials of the wires and the aerogel can be mixed and matched to customize the thermoelectric properties for different applications — such as harnessing waste heat from a power plant, car or household furnace. Since aerogels are nearly transparent, White even envisions making window coatings that exploit indoor versus outdoor temperature differences to generate electricity.

With the right materials, it may be possible to eliminate the internal combustion engine altogether. White and his lab members think they may have a way of doing that. It all comes down to silicon, which is an excellent semiconductor — that’s why our electronic devices are silicon-based — but is also really good at conducting heat via atomic vibrations. White’s group is getting rid of those vibrations by building a silicon-tin composite using a new fabrication technique that grows the material layer by layer.

The work caught the attention of the Naval Research Office, which provides funding for White’s research. “It’s his fabrication method that really makes it different,” says Robert Walters, head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Solid State Devices Branch. “Bruce has developed the fabrication technique that we feel will actually achieve the layered silicon-tin structure, which we think we really need to have to de-couple silicon’s thermal and electrical properties. … It’s a very good idea. It’s innovative and it’s different from other things that we’ve seen.”

The new composite material has a thermal conductivity that’s 1,000 times lower than regular silicon. The group hopes to make it three times lower still by making the crystal purer and more evenly patterned. If the thermal conductivity gets that low, the material would be so good at turning heat into electricity that it could power a car with the burning of a flame.

That’s far off in the future, though. As they work on refining the materials they’ve already developed, White’s group is on the brink of creating less extreme materials that could still have a big impact. Heat-harnessing materials, which could be retrofitted onto a car’s tailpipe or radiator, could soon generate enough electricity to power the car’s electronics. “That alone could increase the fuel efficiency by a few miles per gallon,” White says. “When you think about integrating it over the entire automotive fleet, that makes a huge difference.”

Instead of going home to Brooklyn, Cuiping “Becky” Deng spent last summer in Binghamton investigating the possibilities of solar energy storage.

As a participant in a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, Deng worked closely with a doctoral candidate at the Center for Autonomous Solar Power. For nine weeks, she worked alongside Navjot Kaur Sidhu, building and testing a capacitor that could point the way toward the next generation of energy-storage devices.

“Navjot was very helpful, teaching me how to use all this equipment, how to analyze my data, how to present my findings in a poster,” says Deng, a Binghamton University senior majoring in electrical engineering. “She guided me along, step by step, and once I learned how to actually do that first experiment, she let me mix the chemicals and do the rest by myself. That was the most important lesson, to learn how to work independently.”

Using a combination of metal oxides and conducting polymers, Sidhu is trying to develop a low-cost, high-density, long-lasting supercapacitor to store energy for a variety of applications, especially solar power. Through her own research, Deng has found working examples of supercapacitors that provide energy for solar-powered streetlights in Japan and solar-powered buses in China, where she lived until 2007, when her family moved to New York City.

“This is a very advanced technology, very exciting,” says Deng, who is considering staying in Binghamton for a master’s degree, with a focus on biofuel cells. “When I went to apply for the REU program, this was my first choice, from the beginning. I felt like, ‘Wow, I really want to do this,’ and someday I hope I can apply this knowledge to my own research.”

This year, Deng will continue working with Alok Rastogi, who supervises Sidhu’s research. “I was immediately impressed by her talent for research-oriented projects, and the excitement she felt about this project was exceptional,” says Rastogi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “For an undergraduate to show such an inclination is remarkable. She will lead a team of three students in a senior design project, and I know she is going to do well. I’m counting on her.”

Mark Fowler, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has hired Deng as a teaching assistant. “She’s great to work with, one of our best students,” he says. “She was at the top of the class last year, and this year she’s helping in that same class. She’s strong academically and thinks very logically. But the thing that really stands out is the eagerness she projects in everything she does.”

A doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, Song studies data centers — the nervous systems of our digital lives — and ways to cool them more efficiently.

“I like computers, math and engineering, but it’s not just about technology. It’s more about people,” Song says. “It’s the demand of people who are used to this digital life today that drives the need for the growth of data centers.”

As indispensable as they are, data centers can also be energy hogs. The tens of thousands of data centers across the country used roughly 76 billion kilowatt-hours of energy in 2010, or about 2 percent of the nation’s entire electricity consumption, according to the New York Times. Much of that energy goes into cooling, or thermal management. The processors in a data center emit heat, and overheating can lead to slower processing or even system failure.

Song’s research is part of a growing effort looking at how companies can save money and energy by cooling their data centers more efficiently.

Right now, the standard method used to control energy usage in data centers involves using large-scale computational modeling and costly measurements of the temperatures throughout the data center for specific room configurations. It’s a precise method, but processing all the information and making changes to improve cooling performance can take hours or even days.

Song thinks that’s too long, especially when changes in temperature can mean drastic changes in cost. If a company can maintain healthy operating conditions in its data center, it won’t need to spend as much cooling down overheated processors. If companies can raise the temperature of the cool air they send into data centers by just four degrees Celsius (from 18 to 22 degrees), they use on average 30 percent less energy per minute.

Song is working on a greener solution, which combines smarter scientific modeling, simpler measurement requirements and much, much faster monitoring — so that cooling needs can be diagnosed and adjusted within minutes, rather than days.

The trick, Song thinks, is to develop a smart compact model that can not only provide more effective guidance to heat sensors setup, but can also learn from them via real-time feedback and predict the stuff that cannot be measured.

Because of the wide range of data center configurations and sizes, there is no one-size-fits-all model for thermal management, notes Bruce Murray, professor of mechanical engineering and Song’s advisor.

“Song has shown a lot of initiatives to develop a broad spectrum of compact models,” Murray said. “He’s already published four peer-reviewed journal articles.”