Research into carbon dioxide recycling technologies critical to counteracting climate change is now in the works as Neil Dasgupta, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is the recipient of the prestigious Schmidt Science Polymath Award.
The $2.5 million award, given only to 6 professors annually, is meant to empower intensely creative, early-to-mid-career researchers to take adventurous leaps into new research domains, experiment with new methodologies and ideas, and inspire impactful scientific breakthroughs.
Through this project, Dasgupta aims to collaborate with researchers from across the University of Michigan to prototype a device for carbon dioxide conversion and perform cost-modeling for pathways to scaling up and putting out a value-added product based on that prototype.
“We’re excited to not only look at the science of using renewable electricity to make e-fuels but also to collaborate with some of the great people here at Michigan who do life-cycle assessments to help us quantify the carbon footprint and sustainability, and those who can help us to understand the economics for bringing a product like this to market,” said Dasgupta. “We’re really planning to take this interdisciplinary approach to heart and provide a roadmap for the future.”
Making use of his robust interdisciplinary experiences, Dasgupta has constructed a research enterprise that emphasizes collaboration and inventiveness to address the major issues facing our world.
“Ultimately, the motivation for everything I do is sustainable energy. The battery work that we’ve been performing has a lot of promise for certain applications, like light-duty and passenger vehicles, but certain sectors are difficult to electrify, including long-distance aviation,” said Dasgupta. “That’s not to say that there aren’t promising directions for electrification in those spaces, but I think we need to diversify our portfolio of approaches to try to build out a green sustainable solution all around.”
For these spaces, Dasgupta sees a unique opportunity to make use of renewable electricity to generate other types of fuel sources. Instead of relying on carbon from fossil fuels extracted from the earth’s crust, these e-fuels would make use of carbon drawn out of the earth’s atmosphere.
“You’re basically trying to take the exhaust out of the tailpipe of your powerplant and turn it into an energy source,” Dasgupta said. “If you look at a leaf in a plant, this is basically what it does. It takes solar energy and drives a catalytic process to turn carbon dioxide and water into a tree or a plant.”
Carbon-dioxide conversion is made possible by advances made over the last decade in understanding the fundamental chemistry of catalytic processes. Specifically, much work has been done to understand what the best materials are for producing electrocatalysts, which are materials that help along electrochemical reactions by transferring electrons between an electrode and reactants, to convert carbon dioxide into value-added products.
“There haven’t been as many applied engineering-focused efforts on actually integrating those new materials and the understanding of those mechanisms into a real device,” Dasgupta said. “That’s where I think mechanical engineers can really start to contribute to this field.”
Since joining the University of Michigan in 2014, Dasgupta’s research interests have explored the development of low-cost and high-efficiency renewable energy sources, accelerating electrification of vehicles through high energy density batteries and lightweight composites, and utilizing solar energy for electricity generation, water purification, and sustainable manufacturing.
“From a technical standpoint, our research bridges the intersection between materials, manufacturing, and design in a manner that builds upon core principles of mechanical engineering, but applies them in non-traditional manners,” Dasgupta said.
From an early age, Dasgupta positioned himself to be an interdisciplinary researcher.
He completed his B.S. in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005, his M.S. in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University in 2006, and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering with a minor in materials science and engineering at Stanford University in 2011. After graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I always wanted to be an interdisciplinary researcher, because I believed that to solve the most challenging global problems, like the energy crisis and climate change, you really need diverse perspectives,” Dasgupta said. “I always challenged myself to try to study multiple disciplines and these same big problems, but from different angles.”
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Neil Dasgupta is an associate professor and Miller Faculty Scholar in the U-M Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering. He is also the deputy director of MUSIC, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded Energy Frontier Research Center that aims to understand an emerging branch of science involving mechanical and chemical phenomena that affect advanced energy storage systems.
Dasgupta is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the AFOSR Young Investigator Award (YIP), the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship, the AVS Paul Holloway Young Investigator Award, the SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award, a Scialog Fellowship in Advanced Energy Storage, the ASME Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal, and a U. S. Department of Energy EERE Postdoctoral Research Award (SunShot Fellowship).