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Research Thrusts |
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Engineering Education Innovation
As the world continues to change with globalization and technological advances so must engineering education p...
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Advanced Power System
In the face of an impending energy crisis, the Advanced Power Systems research center is exploring alternative...
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Space Systems
The Space Systems Research group is creating innovative electric propulsion systems to make space travel more ...
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Mechanics of Multi-scale Materials
The Mechanics of Multi-scale Materials research group uncovers the relationships of structures across the full...
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Multi-scale Sensors and Systems
The Multi-scale Sensors and Systems Research Group specializes in the design, fabrication, integration, and te...
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Sustainable Manufacturing and Design
Many of the campus research efforts on sustainability are coordinated by the Sustainable Futures Institute (SF...
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Research Projects
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Scalable Fabrication of Fractal Nanoparticles for Electrochemical Energy Storage |
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Project Date:
2011-07-15 13:30:28 |
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Sponsor:
National Science Foundation
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The research objective of this project is to establish the scientific and engineering foundation for scalable fabrication of fractal nanoparticles, which can be used in energy storage devices (e.g., batteries and supercapacitors) to rival their highly-efficient living counterparts in nature. Fractal and dendritic morphology is an emergent feature which nature adopts to gain remarkable properties, such as the self-cleaning effect of lotus leaves and the dry adhesive capability of geckos' feet. It also accounts for the allometric scaling phenomena of biological systems, which optimized their metabolic subsystems by maximizing the internal reaction area while suppressing the increase the increase of mass transportation path. Such an elegant balance is an important lesson we can learn to improve our energy storage devices that are currently striving to simultaneously improve energy and power densities so as to satisfy demanding applications such as electric vehicles. Although fractal morphology is known to be the optimal form in many natural and man-made systems, its applications are seriously limited by the fabrication capability and the high cost associated with it. the highly-sought-after capability to arbitrarily integrate heterogeneous fractal components with high enough fractal dimension for allometric scaling is far beyond what can be efficiently achieved by the existing fabrication technologies.
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