Carlos F. Lopez, a mechanical engineering master’s student won two graduate poster awards at Student Research Week 2014. His poster, “Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Management for Space Applications,” was awarded First Place in Engineering/Architecture and Second Place for the Sigma Xi Symposium Theme Award among graduate students.
Carlos’ work focuses on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), with improved performance, safety, and life, for aviation and automotive energy storage. Despite the numerous recent advancements, a critical concern for the state-of-the-art LIBs centers on thermal safety. Because of these concerns, it is a critical imperative to accelerate the development of safe and abuse tolerant LIBs. This requires an integrated approach toward advancing the fundamental understanding of failure modes leading to thermal runaway scenarios which could pave the way toward devising novel thermal management strategies (active/passive) for state-of-the-art LIB systems. Carlos’ work is centered on the thermal issues pertaining to electrochemical energy storage in automotive and space industries.
Carlos works at the Energy and Transport Sciences Laboratory (ETSL) under the direction of Dr. Partha Mukherjee. ETSL specializes in exploring mesoscale physics and stochastics pertaining to physicochemical, reactive transport phenomena coupling electrochemistry and electro-kinetics/-statics, functional materials and manufacturing in clean energy. Carlos’ work on battery thermal issues is sponsored by NASA-Johnson Space Center through the Harriet G. Jenkins Graduate Research Fellowship.