News and Events
News and Events
News and Events
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Researchers built a “bridge” between two different types of electrolytes, offering a new approach to next-generation energy storage.
Published by the Cockrell School of Engineering.
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Dr. Vaibhav Bahadur, an associate professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and an affiliate of the Texas Materials Institute, was part of a team of researchers who have published a review of hydrate-based gas separation (HBGS), an alternative method promising to capture CO2 from industrial gases in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They used results from more than 50 experimental studies and compared the cost of HBGS to the established technology of monoethanolamine (MEA) absorption.
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Singlet fission is a process in which one absorbed photon can generate two triplet excitations, offering a potential route toward solar energy materials that make more efficient use of incoming light. Xin Chang, a postdoctoral researcher, and Wennie Wang, an assistant professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering and an affiliate of TMI, have developed a theoretical framework that explains when these normally difficult-to-observe triplet-pair states can leave a detectable fingerprint in a material's optical spectrum.
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Researchers in the Manthiram Research Group have developed a new way to overcome a key compatibility challenge in sodium-metal batteries. Ether-based electrolytes work well with highly reactive sodium metal, but they tend to break down at the high voltages needed for higher-energy batteries. Zhiming Zhao, a research associate in the group, Dr. Arumugam Manthiram, and TMI scientist Dr. Andrei Dolocan have developed a new electrolyte chemistry that allows ether-based electrolytes to operate with high-voltage cathodes while maintaining stable sodium-metal cycling.
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Dr. Devleena Samanta, an Assistant Professor in Chemistry, along with her students Seungheon Lee and Atri Bhattacharya, postdoctoral researcher Subrata Pandit, and a team of researchers have discovered that spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), nanoparticles surrounded by a dense layer of DNA, can interact with enzymes and enhance their activity without permanent chemical attachments or specially designed binding sites.
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On September 1st, Dr. Vaibhav Bahadur testified before the Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs concerning water usage by data centers in Texas.
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Zhantao Chen, an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and a TMI-affiliate, has published an article on an AI tool in Nature Machine Intelligence. The article used AI to help researchers in ways that would assist in experimental tasks that are often labor-intensive and tiresome.
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Materials Science and Engineering graduate student Tianrui (Terry) Zheng, under the supervision of Dr. Guihua Yu has published research in Advanced Materials introducing a biphasic electrolyte architecture that combines the strengths of water-based (aqueous) and organic-based electrolytes for long-duration, high-rate zinc metal batteries.
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The Koo Research Group recently went to the National Space and Missile Materials Symposium. Attendees from the group included Professor Joseph H. Koo and graduate research assistants Samantha Bernstein, Steven Kim, Remy Feru, Akshar Mashruwala, and undergraduate research assistants Courtney Bui and Sean Hong.
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Messenger RNA lipid nanoparticles, or mRNA-LNPs, are central to the development of vaccines and RNA-based therapeutics. However, their broader use is limited by two major challenges: much of the delivered mRNA can remain trapped inside cellular compartments called endosomes, and the nanoparticles can become unstable during frozen storage and thawing.
Meysam Mohammadi-Zerankeshi, a student in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and under the supervision of TMI-affiliate Alexander Marras, led a study examining how storage-buffer composition affects the internal structure, freeze–thaw stability and delivery efficiency of mRNA-LNPs. The research brought together collaborators from several University of Texas at Austin departments, Boston University, and Eli Lilly and Company. The study evaluated three storage buffers—Tris, histidine and citrate—and LNPs containing three different ionizable lipids: LP-01, MC3 and SM-102.
