About this event
Thermal energy transport, conversion and storage are central to many of the industries, technologies and devices we use every day, from our cell phones and laptops to our refrigerators and automobiles. However, there are still a number of thermal phenomena for which the underlying science is not well understood and on the engineering side, there are regimes of operation/performance that are theoretically possible but have remained inaccessible from a practical perspective.
Alan T. Waterman Awardee Asegun Henry, Ph.D., director of the Atomistic Simulation & Energy (ASE) research group and professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and his collaborators have managed to realize important advancements on some of these problems, by rethinking problems from the beginning and challenging established paradigms.
On August 31, 2023, from 1:00pm to 2:00pm Eastern, Dr. Henry will highlight new developments in our understanding of phonons (e.g., atomic vibrations in rigid bodies), and our ability to model their behaviors accurately. In addition, this talk will review recent progress towards enabling heat transfer at extreme temperatures by using liquid metal as a heat transfer fluid in all graphite/ceramic infrastructures. Most notably, the ASE group has made significant strides towards developing thermal batteries, as a solution to the grid storage problem as well as CO2 free hydrogen production based on methane pyrolysis.
UPDATE: Watch a recording of the lecture. Captions are provided.