IMX Seminar Series - Materials Design of Natural Carbon

Our planet’s health needs an acceleration in the pace of progress towards clean and sustainable energy and water technologies. Advances in these technologies are critically dependent on materials innovation, which in turn relies on the ability to understand and control matter at the atomic scale to realize optimized performance across an exhaustive set of metrics. Materials science and engineering is at the core of many of these challenges, where key mechanisms dominate intrinsic properties of the active materials involved. This lecture will focus on the opportunities afforded by rethinking natural carbon feedstocks, including coal, tar, and pitch, as a basis for materials design of sustainable technologies. The ultra-low cost of these materials and their diverse chemical nature offer a wide range of exciting opportunities for many applications due to broadly tunable chemical, electric, mechanical properties. Carbon-rich feedstocks provide this flexibility because of their potential for complex hybridization, which in turn can be leveraged in manufacturing to create, potentially, a highly diverse array of technologies within the same manufacturing stream. We will show recent examples of our work towards a deeper understanding of these highly heterogenous carbonaceous materials and illustration of their potential use in functional coatings, transparent heaters, resilient membranes, and additive manufacturing.

Bio: Jeffrey C. Grossman is the Department Head of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois and performed postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a Lawrence Fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and returned to Berkeley as director of a Nanoscience Center and head of the Computational Nanoscience research group, with a focus on energy applications. In fall 2009, he joined MIT, where he has developed a research program known for its contributions to energy conversion, energy storage, membranes, and clean-water technologies. In recognition of his contributions to engineering education, Grossman was named an MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellow and received the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, in addition to being named a fellow of the American Physical Society. He has published more than 200 scientific papers, holds 17 current or pending U.S. patents, and recently co-founded a company to commercialize graphene-oxide membranes.