EPSCoR Research Fellows: NSF: In Situ Structural Characterization of Copper-Carbon Heterostructures for Renewable Energy

Our society relies on clean sources of energy for food, shelter, transportation, and recreational activities. In recent years, nanomaterials have garnered much interest due to their transformative properties in storing information, catalyzing reactivity, and enhancing electronic dynamics for new modalities and functionalities. This fellowship project explores how an emergent class of nanomaterials based on the fusion of copper with carbon can lead to unprecedented levels of thermal energy management.

To accomplish the scientific aims, the team will employ a range of advanced optical and X-ray radiation strategies that shed light on the complex origins of enhanced thermal conductivity on microscopic levels down to tens of nanometers – the length scale of grain boundaries, transport, and chemical structures. The work will further study the flow of electrons and changes through a material under a temperature jump, and how this translates into applied technologies.

This new class of materials hold promise for the most demanding and intensive of clean energy applications because of their scalability and projected vast energy savings in electricity, high performance transformer cables, and in powering the national grid with great potentials for transforming societal outcomes in energy resilience and carbon-neutrality. Additionally, a diverse student body will participate as teaching trainees with the outcomes disseminated broadly.

This Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) EPSCoR Research Fellows project will provide a fellowship to an Assistant Professor and training for a graduate student at Brown University. This work will be conducted in collaboration with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. This fellowship aims to explore the physical, electronic, and chemical properties of clean energy-based nanomaterials.

The project reveals important information about the charge transfer dynamics and flow of electrons in a highly conductive copper-carbon composite material for the development of novel enhanced thermal conductivity. To this end, the team will investigate the origins of enhanced thermal conduction properties with 2D X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and ultrafast electron diffraction imaging.

A range of spectroscopic techniques with high temporal, high spatial, and high energy resolution will help to understand the correspondence between macroscopic thermal conductivity and microscopic electron density changes at the copper-carbon interface. The fellowship will further quantify how size and structure play a role in enhanced electron or thermal transport especially along grain boundaries.

Knowledge gained will help to design parameters inherent in chemical and electronic structures that lead to enhanced electron transport mediated by lattice distortions both across the surface of the thin film and its bulk properties.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.