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Dr. Debra R. Rolison
Naval Research Laboratory
Abstract
Architectural Nanoscience en route to the Integrated Multifunction Necessary for Enhanced Energy Storage and Conversion
No power = No Mission ... and many key military (and commercial) portable power sources?batteries, fuel cells, supercapacitors, photoelectrochemical cells?are based on electrochemical principles. These devices must optimally balance multiple functions (molecular mass transport, ionic/electronic/thermal conductivity, and electron-transfer kinetics) even though these functions often require contradictory solid-state structures. The fundamental processes that produce or store energy can now be rethought in light of architectural nanoscience: the design and fabrication of three-dimensional multifunctional architectures from appropriate nanoscale building blocks, including the use of aperiodic "nothing" (void space) and deliberate disorder as design components. Nothing, i.e., porosity, is an important part of any nanostructured material that does chemistry. Rate-critical reactions are most effective when the transport paths by which molecules move into a power-generating architecture are included as an integral part of the design. Such advanced architectures can now be created in which the pore and solid structural components are controlled on the nanoscale by the use of sol-gel syntheses to yield rapid diffusional flux of reactants/analytes/substrates to internal surfaces. Aperiodic nanoarchitectures derived through soft chemistry provide a flexible research platform to study energy storage/conversion chemistry. Our research into these structures indicates that physicochemical defects act as important parameters in increasing performance of electrochemically derived power sources (i.e., improved energy capacity or rates of fuel oxidation). Understanding and maintaining disorder, the typical state exhibited by aerogel-related nanoarchitectures, in balance with order (e.g., to move electronic charge) are goals that require enormous advances in fundamental science. Fundamental insight into the complexity innate to disordered systems-and the ability to control and pin highly functional disorder on the nanoscale-will directly translate into the design of higher performance electrochemical power devices.
Biography
Debra Rolison received a B.S. in Chemistry from Florida Atlantic University in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1980 under the direction of Royce W. Murray. Dr. Rolison joined the Naval Research Laboratory as a research chemist in 1980 and currently heads the Advanced Electrochemical Materials section. She is also an Adjunct Full Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah.
Her research at the NRL focuses on multifunctional nanoarchitectures, with emphasis on new nanostructured materials for catalytic chemistries, energy storage and conversion, biomolecular composites, porous magnets, and sensors. She is the principal inventor of composite aerogels; electrified microheterogeneous catalysis; a process to electrodesulfurize carbons and coals under mild conditions; and 3-D nanowired mesoporous architectures.
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