The 1,001st Meeting of the Northeastern Section of the
American Chemical Society
Joint NOBCChE-NESACS Meeting
Pathways to sustainability through electrochemical
technologies
Fikile Brushett
Fikile Brushett
Associate Professor in the
Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT
February 11th 2021
4:30-5:30pm NESACS Board Meeting
5:30-6:30pm Break for Dinner
6:30-7:00pm Virtual Networking
7:00-8:30pm Presentation of Henry Hill Award to Katherine Lee and Henry Hill Lecture
by Professor Fikile Brushett
ABSTRACT: Energy is essential to modern society and the abundance, availability, and affordability of liquid fossil fuels has been a key driver of the past century’s progress. However, with continued growth in energy demand worldwide, there is an increasingly urgent need to decouple carbon emissions from economic activity without stifling development. Electrochemical processes are poised to play a pivotal role in the evolving global power system as the efficient interconversion of electrical and chemical energy can enable the deployment of sustainable technologies that support the decarbonization of the electric grid, power the automotive fleet, and offer new opportunities in chemical manufacturing. Meeting these emerging needs will require significant advances in technology as the stringent performance, cost, and scale requirements cannot be met by many of today’s systems. Using grid energy storage as an example, I will discuss the use of techno-economic modeling to inform research approaches in fundamental and applied electrochemistry with a particular emphasis on connecting system targets to materials property sets and on leveraging this knowledge to guide the exploration of new chemistries and reactor designs. Ultimately, I aim to describe an emerging opportunity space for electrochemical technologies and, hopefully, to inspire new ideas for future products and processes.
BIO: Fikile Brushett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he holds the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Chair. He received his B.S.E. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010 under the supervision of Professor Paul J. A. Kenis. From 2010-2012, he was a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Electrochemical Energy Storage Group at Argonne National Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. John T. Vaughey. In 2012, he started his independent career at MIT where his research group seeks to advance the science and engineering of electrochemical technologies that enable a sustainable energy economy. Brushett is especially interested in the fundamental processes that define the performance, cost, and lifetime of present day and future electrochemical systems. His group currently works on redox flow batteries for grid storage and electrochemical processing of carbon dioxide and biomass. He also serves as the Research Integration co-Lead for the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a DOE-funded Energy Innovation Hub.
