Susan Sinnott, department head and professor of materials science and engineering, will serve as the deputy director for the Fast and Cooperative Ion Transport in Polymer-Based Electrolytes (FaCT) EFRC. It will receive $11.5 million over four years to focus on polymer electrolytes for next-generation energy storage devices such as fuel cells and solid-state electric vehicle batteries. 
“The collaborative research taking place in FaCT will advance the fundamental science of ion and proton transport in new solid-state electrolyte materials,” said Sinnott. “This advancement promises to enable safer and longer-lived batteries for electronic devices and other applications.”
The center is led by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and additional Penn State faculty include Ralph Colby and Michael Hickner, both professors of materials science and engineering and chemical engineering, and Wesley Reinhart, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and Institute for Computational and Data Sciences co-hire.
Faculty from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Texas A&M University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Georgia State University are also part of FaCT.
Ismaila Dabo, associate professor of materials science and engineering, is part of the research team for the second EFRC, Center for Electrochemical Dynamics and Reactions on Surfaces (CEDARS). Led by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, it will receive $10.35 million over four years to focus on splitting hydrogen and oxygen from water to produce clean hydrogen for energy use.
In addition to Penn State, CEDARS also includes faculty from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cornell University, Colorado University at Boulder, and DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Penn State leads two of the forty-three ERFCs: Three-Dimensional Ferroelectric Microelectronics (3DFeM) and the Center for Lignocellulose Structure and Formation (CLSF). Penn State also has twenty-one faculty on one or more EFRC research team, including eleven associated with MatSE.
3DFeM is led by Susan Trolier-McKinstry, Evan Pugh University Professor and Flaschen Professor of Ceramic Science and Engineering. 3DFeM is tackling the non-von Neumann challenge to propel radical advances in microelectronic devices, circuits, and systems. The goal of 3DFeM is to enable a million-fold enhancement in interconnection between memory and logic, along with substantial reductions in the energy cost to computation. 3DFeM is in its third year of funding.
CLSF is led by Daniel Cosgrove, the Eberly Chair and professor of biology. The focus on CLSF is to develop a nano- to meso-scale understanding of cellulosic cell walls, the energy rich structural material in plants, and the physical mechanisms of wall assembly, forming the foundation for new technologies in sustainable energy and novel biomaterials. CLSF has been continuously funded since the inception of the ERFC program in 2009.
DOE’s EFRC program has become an important research modality in the department’s portfolio, enabling high impact research that addresses key scientific challenges for energy technologies. Funded by the Office of Science’s Basic Energy Sciences program, the EFRCs are located across the United States and are led by universities, national laboratories, and private research institutions. These multi-investigator, multidisciplinary centers bring together world-class teams of researchers, often from multiple institutions.
Digital publication: Imagine, Fall 2022.
