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| Research News |
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PhD student Ezequiel Medici and his faculty advisor Dr. Jeffrey Allen have been awarded the 2010 Bhakta Rath Research Award. |
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PhD student Ezequiel Medici and his faculty advisor Dr. Jeffrey Allen have been awarded the 2010 Bhakta Rath Research Award. They are the first recipients of the Bhakta Rath Research Award. The award recognizes excellence in scientific and engineering research in the field of physical and natural sciences and engineering.
When Bhakta B. Rath was earning his master's degree in metallurgical and materials engineering at Michigan Technological University in 1958, the US was an undisputed world leader in science and technology. Now he is the associate director of research and head of the Materials Science and Component Technology Directorate at the US Naval Research Laboratory, and Rath worries a lot about a declining interest in this country in studying science and technology.
He and his wife, Sushama Rath, have endowed the Bhakta Rath Research Award to motivate Michigan Tech faculty and doctoral students to conduct the kind of research that will meet the nation's needs and the challenges of emerging technologies.
Rath hopes the new award named in his honor will promote and reward research excellence in the physical and natural sciences and engineering. "Michigan Technological University is one of the leading institutions for science and engineering curriculum and is rapidly emerging through its development of graduate education and research, which is an important and integral part of advanced studies," Rath noted. "We want to recognize the best research conducted by a doctoral student and his collaborating faculty member."
The research being conducted by Ezequiel Medici and his advisor Jeffrey Allen is focused on improving water management in low temperature (less than 100 degrees C) fuel cells. Mismanagement of the liquid water produced during operation leads to performance loss and rapid degradation of the fuel cell, significantly reducing the life of the system. Medici and Allen have developed a new method for characterizing and optimizing fuel cell electrodes for improved water management. In addition to the experimental work, a simple, reliable, computational tool able to capture the nature of the liquid water movement in fuel cell electrodes has been developed and validated. The use of this numerical model reduces the computational requirements when compared with other methods, and will reduce the research and development time and cost for improving fuel cell performance and durability. Their techniques are equally applicable to other technologies involving porous materials.
The work was sponsored by the Department of Energy and conducted in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology and General Motors. "I am honored and grateful to be one of the inaugural recipients of this prestigious award. The credit for the success of this research belongs to Ezequiel." said Jeffrey Allen.
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