Decarbonization

Our Newest Publications in Decarbonization

Clean metals production by solid oxide membrane electrolysis process (Uday Pal)

Clean metals production technology utilizes an oxygen-ion-conducting solid oxide membrane (SOM) to directly electrolyze metal oxides dissolved in a non-consumable molten salt. During the SOM electrolysis process, the desired metal such as magnesium, aluminum, silicon, or a rare earth is produced at the cathode while pure oxygen gas evolves at anode. Compared with current state-of-the-art metal production processes, such as chloride-based electrolysis process for Mg production and Hall-Héroult process for smelting Al, the SOM process brings various advantages such as simplified design, lower cost, lower energy use, and zero emissions. It provides a general route for producing various metals and has great potential to replace current metals production processes.

Machine Learning Informed Computational Fluid Dynamics for the Design of Carbon Capture Reactors

Prof. Ryan’s group is working with Precision Combustion Inc. to develop machine learning informed models for the fast, accurate simulation of novel materials for carbon capture. Traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling is accurate but can take days to run on high performance computing. In this research we use CFD models to train cheaper machine learning models that can then be used to optimize the carbon capture reactor design.

Exploring Wet Etching Reactions in Nanoconfinements (Chuanhua Duan)

The ever-increasing demand for improving device density and performance of integrated circuits (ICs) has pushed the semiconductor industry to switch from traditional planar device design to 3-D device design, which inevitably creates more challenges for manufacturing. One of the major challenges for manufacturing 3-D ICs is wet etching of target materials “plugged” in nanoconfinements (e.g. etching of TiN between fins in FinFET and etching of polysilicon in high-aspect-ratio contact holes in 3-D NAND). The non-uniform etching rates in different nanoconfinements give rise to various issues in performance, yield, reliability, and cost of the final 3-D ICs. In this project, we aim to measure and understand wet etching reactions in nanoconfinements (WERIN) as well as to develop new strategies to improve the etching rate, specificity and uniformity of WERIN. We will fabricate planar nanochannels and vertical nanotrenches/nanoholes filled with target materials (e.g. polysilicon or SiO2) and use these nanoconduits to study the effects of electrostatic interactions, water structuring, wetting, patterning density, confinement location and external fluid flow on kinetics, specificity and uniformity of WERIN. We will also explore several advanced methods including DC gating, AC electroosmosis, diffusiophoresis and acoustophoresis to improve WERIN.