Recent News

NSE’s Shaner wins Heller Entrepreneurship Grant

NSE graduate student Sam Shaner was one of four students recently awarded the Ronald I. Heller Entrepreneurship Grant by MIT through the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

The Ronald I. Heller Entrepreneurship Grant is presented annually to a MIT student or group of students for their significant impact on the quality and overall spirit of entrepreneurship at the Institute, working closely with the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and for their leadership and entrepreneurial fervor in introducing more students to entrepreneurship. ...more

NSE students graduate from Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program

Four NSE students were among 59 across the Institute who were awarded Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program Certificates this week. Cameron McCord and Ekaterina Paramonova received Advanced Certificates of Engineering Leadership for successfully completing the requirements of the two-year Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. Cameron French and Jake Jurewicz earned Certificates of Engineering Leadership for completing their first year in the program. French and Jurewicz will start the second year program in fall 2013. ... more

NSE celebrates outstanding students at the Annual Awards Dinner

Innovation and commercialization in nuclear energy

On April 26th, 2013, a group of about 40 experts in nuclear energy technology, energy policy, energy and venture finance, regulation, and philanthropy gathered at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts to discuss the challenges and barriers to innovation and commercialization of new nuclear energy technologies  and to discuss solution strategies. ... more

NSE-led UPower wins category in MIT Clean Energy Prize, is finalist in MIT 100K competition

The sixth annual MIT Clean Energy Prize (CEP) competition, held Monday night, awarded a total of $320,000 to five teams that have developed clean-energy startups and innovations.

The contest, co-sponsored by Massachusetts utility NSTAR and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and open to teams from any American university, is the nation’s leading student-run energy business-plan competition. Past participants have gone on to raise a total of $130 million in funding. ... more

NSE's Gilman honored at ODGE celebration of women graduate students

In April 2013, MIT's Office of the Dean for Graduate Education hosted a celebration of graduate women at MIT. NSE's Lindsey Gilman was one of 47 graduate students who were nominated by their peers, faculty, and staff. The honorees were nominated and selected based on their leadership and service contributions at the Institute, their dedication to mentoring and their drive to make changes to improve student experience. At the celebration, held at the Microsoft NERD Center, honorees presented posters to help attendees:

learn about their accomplishments
celebrate their work
discovere the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead ... more

Unleashing oxygen

‘Superlattice’ structure could give a huge boost to oxygen reaction in fuel cells, increasing their power potential.

New research at MIT could dramatically improve the efficiency of fuel cells, which are considered a promising alternative to batteries for powering everything from electronic devices to cars and homes.

Fuel cells make electricity by combining hydrogen, or hydrocarbon fuels, with oxygen. But the most efficient types, called solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC), have drawbacks that have limited their usefulness — including operating temperatures above 700 degrees Celsius (roughly 1300 degrees Fahrenheit). Now, MIT researchers have unraveled the properties of a promising alternative material structure for a key component of these devices.

The new structure, a “superlattice” of two compounds interleaved at a tiny scale, could serve as one of the two electrodes in the fuel cell. The complex material, discovered about six years ago and known as LSC113/214, is composed of two oxides of the elements lanthanum, strontium and cobalt. While one of the oxides was already known as an especially good material for such electrodes, the combination of the two is far more potent in promoting oxygen reduction than either oxide alone.

The interfaces between these two oxides were thought to be the key. But until now, no one had been able to observe the LSC113/214 interface properties in operation, at sufficiently high resolution, to figure out why it worked so well. ... more

Understanding the turbulence in plasmas

New experiments in a tokamak fusion reactor reveal details of a cooling process, potentially bringing practical fusion closer.

A longstanding joke holds that practical fusion power is about 20 years away — and always will be.

One simple phenomenon explains why practical, self-sustaining fusion reactions have proved difficult to achieve: Turbulence in the superhot, electrically charged gas, called plasma, that circulates inside a fusion reactor can cause the plasma to lose much of its heat. This prevents the plasma from reaching the temperatures needed to overcome the electrical repulsion between atomic nuclei — which, in turn, prevents those nuclei from fusing together. But in order to tame that turbulence, scientists first must understand it.

Researchers at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) have now taken a significant step in that direction by quantifying a previously unknown type of small-scale turbulence that can have big effects on cooling the plasma in a reactor. Their results were published online in the journal Physics of Plasmas, and further described in a recent talk at a conference called the U.S.-E.U. Joint Transport Task Force Workshop. ... more

Changing the face of the nuclear engineer

Students of nuclear science and technology learned from experts in the field, presented their unique research, and captured on video what it means to be a nuclear scientist or nuclear engineer last week at the 2013 American Nuclear Society Student Conference. The first ever “I’m a Nuke” videos will be featuring nuclear science and technology students from across the world who participated in the conference hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Student Section of the American Nuclear Society.

The conference theme was the Public Image of the Nuclear Engineer. This was based on the conflicting views of the nuclear industry which many continue to hold. Although nuclear energy is safe, clean, and reliable, it has many obstacles in convincing the public of its successes. ... more

NSE-led teams sweep Future Energy @ MIT pitch competition

On April 4 three NSE-led teams took the top prizes in a Boston-area pitch competition focused on finding radical new solutions to the world’s energy challenges. The pitch contest, Future Energy @ MIT, was convened by Ultra Light Startups, an organizer of pitch events, with MIT partners the MIT Energy Club and the MIT Clean Energy Prize. The event featured eight energy and clean-tech startups from Boston-area schools presenting to a panel of venture capital and corporate investors. ... more

Watching fluid flow at nanometer scales

Researchers find that tiny nanowires can lift liquids as effectively as tubes.

Imagine if you could drink a glass of water just by inserting a solid wire into it and sucking on it as though it were a soda straw. It turns out that if you were tiny enough, that method would work just fine — and wouldn’t even require the suction to start.

New research carried out at MIT and elsewhere has demonstrated for the first time that when inserted into a pool of liquid, nanowires — wires that are only hundreds of nanometers (billionths of a meter) across — naturally draw the liquid upward in a thin film that coats the surface of the wire. The finding could have applications in microfluidic devices, biomedical research and inkjet printers.

The phenomenon had been predicted by theorists, but never observed because the process is too small to be seen by optical microscopes; electron microscopes need to operate in a vacuum, which would cause most liquids to evaporate almost instantly. To overcome this, the MIT team used an ionic liquid called DMPI-TFSI, which remains stable even in a powerful vacuum. Though the observations used this specific liquid, the results are believed to apply to most liquids, including water.

The results are published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology by a team of researchers led by Ju Li, an MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and materials science and engineering, along with researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, and Zhejiang University in China. ... more

Bringing a Star to Earth for Energy: Dennis Whyte at TEDxBeaconStreet

Our lives revolve entirely around electricity. Dennis Whyte, a Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, has a vision for how we can consume energy in a cleaner, nearly limitless way. It’s called magnetic fusion — the same process that keeps our sun and stars burning bright. To recreate that power, a group of researchers at MIT are working to bring a star to earth — that is, they’re engineering a device that uses powerful magnetic fields and advanced superconductor materials. It’s not science fiction, it’s happening right now at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center in Cambridge, MA. In this future-facing TEDxBeaconStreet talk, Dennis Whyte talks through the development of a revolutionary energy device that can change our world in a very big way. ... watch video

NSE ranked #1 in the country by U.S. News and World Report

Extending a decades-long run, MIT’s graduate program in engineering has again been ranked No. 1 in the country by U.S. News & World Report. MIT has held the top spot since 1990, when the magazine first ranked graduate programs in engineering.

U.S. News awarded MIT a score of 100 among graduate programs in engineering, followed by No. 2 Stanford University (95), No. 3 University of California at Berkeley (87), and No. 4 California Institute of Technology (78).

MIT’s graduate programs led U.S. News lists in seven engineering disciplines, up from four No. 1 rankings last year. Top-ranked at MIT this year are programs in aerospace engineering (tied with Caltech); chemical engineering; materials engineering; computer engineering; electrical engineering (tied with Stanford); mechanical engineering (tied with Stanford); and nuclear engineering. Other top-five graduate programs at MIT include industrial/manufacturing/systems engineering (No. 3, tied with Northwestern University, Stanford and Berkeley) and biomedical engineering (No. 5). ... more

NSE Rising Stars symposium offers young women researchers rare opportunity

There was a profound sense of fellowship in the room March 5th when a dozen outstanding young women researchers gathered at MIT for the Rising Stars in Nuclear Science and Engineering Symposium. Of all the engineering disciplines, nuclear science and engineering might be the loneliest for women, with just 228 female graduate students and 13 postdoctoral fellows pursuing the field at the National Science Foundation’s last count. This forum, organized by the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, provided a singular opportunity for women on the verge of launching their careers in the discipline to share research and connect with each other and with established academics and practitioners. ... more

Advice for nations pursuing nuclear power: Lady Barbara Judge delivers 12th Rose Lecture

Lady Barbara Judge has a unique global perspective on nuclear power, combining top-level financial and legal experience with oversight and advisory roles in nuclear energy efforts in the UK, United Arab Emirates, Japan, and elsewhere. As MIT NSE’s twelfth David J. Rose Lecturer, she shared insights into the many challenges facing nations trying to start or maintain nuclear power programs, while noting that, even in a post-Fukushima world, fission has an essential role in “keeping the lights on for our families, our children, and the two billion people in the world who have no electricity at all. ” ... more

NSE students in the national spotlight

NSE graduate students Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, and alum Robert Petrowski were names to the Forbes 30 under 30 rising stars in the energy sector. Seniors Cameraon McCord, Ekaterina Paramonova, and Ethan Peterson were names to the Business Insider 14 most impressive students at MIT list.... more

Lawmakers focus on MIT fusion research

Three members of Congress visited the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) last week to learn more about fusion research, and to understand the importance of MIT’s Alcator C-Mod tokamak to the national and world fusion effort.

On Wednesday, January 30, U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-Mass.) and U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) received separate tours of the C-Mod control room and cell, guided by PSFC Director Miklos Porkolab, Associate Director Martin Greenwald and Alcator Project Head Earl Marmar. U.S. Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) toured the lab on Friday, February 1.

Kennedy, Tierney and Udall learned about fusion energy and the current status of the Alcator Project, which would cease operation under the Department of Energy’s Presidential 2013 budget guidance. They discussed fusion’s potential importance to national security, its value to the economy and its advantages as a green technology. ... slideshow

In the war against climate change, look to the states

Boston Globe op ed by Richard K. Lester, January 27, 2013

Nature's signals are changing American minds about the risks of climate change. But Washington’s minds are lagging, despite President Obama’s stirring call to action in his inaugural speech.

The best hope for achieving the transition to a low-carbon economy is through innovation to reduce the costs of new energy technologies. Energy markets left to themselves will discount climate-change risks, so public action to encourage these innovations is needed. But public action does not mean putting government agencies at the center of the innovation system. Instead, the focus should be on unlocking the immense creativity and resources of America’s private entrepreneurs, investors, producers, and energy users.

The debate in Washington on how to do this has featured two and a half ideas — from Democrats, Republicans, and economists. The economists’ big idea has been to attach a price to carbon emissions. That idea has intellectual merit but lacks congressional support. And it would only be a partial solution. ... download pdf

Stress corrosion cracking

New experiments, new insights

High stresses combined with a corrosive environment can cause critical components inside power plants and other systems to crack and fail, sometimes with little warning. MIT researchers now have new insights into how such “stress corrosion cracking” may be affected by nanoscale disruptions in the crystalline structure of metallic materials. Using novel experimental methods, they showed that mismatches between adjacent crystals can create regions with altered mechanical properties, including hardness. In addition, those defects can change the electronic properties of the surface in the region, making reaction with oxygen more likely and accelerating the pace of corrosion. Ultimately, the MIT researchers hope to define nanostructures that can help prevent this pervasive, insidious form of material degradation and failure. ... more

NSE’s Yue Fan awarded two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships

NSE doctoral student Yue Fan has been selected for the 2013 Aneesur Rahman Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Materials Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory and the Wigner Fellowship from Oak Ridge national Laboratory. The Argonne National Laboratory Named Fellowships are awarded to candidates who display outstanding ability in scientific or engineering research and who show definite promise of leadership in the research they pursue. The Wigner Fellowship is ORNL's most prestigious fellowship. It provides an opportunity for outstanding early career physical, computational, life, and social scientists and engineers to select and pursue fundamental or applied research in ares of their interest. ... more

Funneling the sun’s energy

MIT engineers propose a new way of harnessing photons for electricity, with the potential for capturing a wider spectrum of solar energy.

The quest to harness a broader spectrum of sunlight’s energy to produce electricity has taken a radically new turn, with the proposal of a “solar energy funnel” that takes advantage of materials under elastic strain.

“We’re trying to use elastic strains to produce unprecedented properties,” says Ju Li, an MIT professor and corresponding author of a paper describing the new solar-funnel concept that was published this week in the journal Nature Photonics.

In this case, the “funnel” is a metaphor: Electrons and their counterparts, holes — which are split off from atoms by the energy of photons — are driven to the center of the structure by electronic forces, not by gravity as in a household funnel. And yet, as it happens, the material actually does assume the shape of a funnel: It is a stretched sheet of vanishingly thin material, poked down at its center by a microscopic needle that indents the surface and produces a curved, funnel-like shape. ... more

Buongiorno and McKrell awarded over $400K by CEA, France

Professor Jacopo Buongiorno and Dr. Thomas McKrell have been awarded $412,000 by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) for a project on transient boiling heat transfer. ... more

Size diversity in cement nanoparticles optimizes packing density to give concrete its strength

Concrete may be one of the most familiar building materials on Earth, but its underlying structure remains a bit of a mystery. Materials scientists and concrete engineers still don’t fully understand exactly how the cement paste that works as glue in concrete hardens during the first hours after water and cement powder are mixed.

New technologies are making it possible for researchers in MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub to make steady progress toward solving this mystery. First they determined that cement paste is a granular material, where the particles or basic nanoscale units pack together most densely when arranged orderly. A few years later they discovered that the calcium-silicate-hydrate (C-S-H) molecules that make up the basic nanoscale unit of cement have a disorderly geometric arrangement, rather than the orderly crystalline structure scientists had long assumed. ... more

NSE undergraduate Victoria Winters presents winning poster at the APS Division of Plasma Physics Annual Meeting

NSE undergraduate Victoria Winters ’14 won one of three Undergraduate Poster Awards at the 54th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. ... more

NSE Senior Ethan E. Peterson wins National Scholar-Athlete award

Ethan E. Peterson ’13 is a Course 22 (Nuclear Science and Engineering) and Course 8 (Physics) senior on MIT Men’s Varsity Football. He has started on the MIT offensive line for the last three seasons and became co-captain last season. ... more

NSE’s women rowers race in 2012 Head of the Charles Regatta

NSE’s graduate students Lauren Ayers and Sara Ferry participated in the 2012 Head of the Charles Regatta held on October 20 and 21.

Ferry was part of the MIT Lightweight Women's Alumnae Crew competing on Saturday. The MIT crew finished with a time of 19 minutes, 23 seconds (19:23.924) a little under 3 minutes behind the winning University of Michigan team against 34 entries.

Ayers competed in the Lightweight Women's Eight race, the final race in the Regatta on Sunday afternoon. The MIT team finished in 17 minutes, 50 seconds (17:50.809), just under 52 seconds behind the winning Radcliffe Crew.

2012 HOCR website

Profile: Ju Li explores new nanomaterials

Working from the scale of atoms on up, he designs materials for future energy applications.

Growing up in China as the son of two engineers, Ju Li says he was initially more interested in pure science than in hands-on engineering. “I was pretty fascinated by theoretical physics when I was a kid,” he recalls.

But in the end, he found a way to combine the theoretical with the practical: studying how atoms and electrons behave and interact in a way that allows him to design new materials from the atomic level on up.

Li, who holds a joint appointment as a professor in MIT’s departments of materials science and engineering (DMSE) and nuclear science and engineering (NSE), has ended up in a field of research that could transform the way energy is generated, stored and used — in everything from batteries tinier than mitochondria to huge nuclear powerplants. ... more

Probing the mysteries of cracks and stresses

Analysis of molecular-level fracture and stress mechanisms could have broad implications for understanding materials’ behavior.

Diving into a pool from a few feet up allows you to enter the water smoothly and painlessly, but jumping from a bridge can lead to a fatal impact. The water is the same in each case, so why is the effect of hitting its surface so different?

This seemingly basic question is at the heart of complex research by a team in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) that studied how materials react to stresses, including impacts. The findings could ultimately help explain phenomena as varied as the breakdown of concrete under sudden stress and the effects of corrosion on various metal surfaces. ... more