Posts tagged technology
7 CU engineering students among the Big Brains
Nov 13th
among 20 national engineering leaders
Seven University of Colorado Boulder aerospace engineering students are among 20 top students who will be recognized Nov. 14 with a new national award honoring tomorrow’s engineering leaders sponsored by Penton’s Aviation Week in partnership with Raytheon.
The “Twenty20s” awards honor the academic achievements and leadership of top engineering, math, science and technology students.
The CU-Boulder award winners are doctoral candidates Paul Anderson, Brad Cheetham, Jake Gamsky, Erin Griggs and Dan Lubey, and B.S./M.S. students Kirstyn Johnson and Mike Lotto. The awards will be presented during Aviation Week’s annual Aerospace & Defense Programs Conference in Phoenix.
“I am delighted with the national recognition our outstanding aerospace undergraduate and graduate students are receiving from Aviation Week,” said Penina Axelrad, chair of CU-Boulder’s Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “All of them bring incredible passion and impressive technical skills to their classwork and to an extensive portfolio of professional and extracurricular activities. Each is on a fast track to making remarkable contributions in fields like space exploration and satellite-based Earth observations.”
The high-profile projects and research portfolios of the seven students cover a wide range of critical issues facing the field of aerospace engineering today.
Working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration, Cheetham has been developing and co-teaching graduate-level courses on commercial spaceflight, while Gamsky is helping to design the Dream Chaser commercial spacecraft as an intern at Sierra Nevada Corp. and conducting research on human spaceflight life-support technology.
Griggs is developing a next-generation Global Positioning System receiver for spacecraft. Anderson is working to model geostationary space debris and Lubey is studying space situational awareness to detect and model satellite maneuvers.
In their senior year of the undergraduate portion of their concurrent B.S./M.S. degrees, Lotto and Johnson both hold perfect 4.0 grade-point averages and have completed internship or co-op experiences with NASA. They are working together as part of a capstone senior project design team that is developing a dust impact monitor capable of measuring the size of tiny cosmic dust particles near the surface of the sun.
In addition to their outstanding academic achievements, the students were selected for their leadership and civic involvement outside of the classroom. All are active in professional and student societies and volunteer their time to help others. From encouraging K-12 outreach to volunteering with Habitat for Humanity to mentoring and tutoring fellow classmates, the seven students all make service a priority.
“For most of us this is more than a career, it’s a passion,” said Cheetham, who three years ago launched the “We Want Our Future” educational initiative to inspire American youth and strengthen their interest in math and science.
Anderson, who mentors undergraduates and participates in outreach to younger students, agreed. “We’re fostering the next generation of engineers here,” he said. “We want to inspire them to continue the great things we’re doing in aerospace.”
Six of the seven students will attend the awards ceremony in Phoenix along with former NASA astronaut and aerospace engineering sciences faculty member Joe Tanner.
Tanner and Axelrad said the Twenty20s winners are representative of the high caliber of many of the students in CU-Boulder’s aerospace program, which is considered one of the best in the nation.
“Our department is proud to count these seven among our students and we look forward to watching their careers take flight,” says Axelrad. “We will continue to create opportunities for students like these to learn from our exceptional faculty, collaborate in hands-on projects with talented peers and industry partners, and engage in cutting-edge aerospace research.”
For more information on CU-Boulder’s Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences visit http://www.colorado.edu/aerospace/.
-CU-
22 Boom – Fall TV Special 2013 – Episode 69
Oct 7th
For 22 Boom’s Fall TV Special of 2013 we bring you some great videos that go along with the season, including Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Theatrical Costumes Etc. Costume Shop, Predictions about the future, the Boulder Cemetery Spirit Walk, the Boulder Mall Crawl, plus Jann visit the Boulder Hometown Fair and talks with Police at the Annual Starlite Classic Car Show, more news about suntans and nuclear power, then a movie trailer of Warm Bodies a film about a zombie that falls in love. Then in our technology section we visit with Jane Lewis at the Boulder Chamber of Commerce to learn about some upcoming events this Fall, Robert Reich talks to us about Start Up companies and his New Tech Meetup events, and we wrap up the show with our Boulder Channel 1 presentation at the New Tech Meetup.
Videos in this Episode
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22 Boom Intro -
Fall TV Special -
Michael Jackson – Thriller -
Fall TV Special -
Theatrical Costumes Etc… and Trendy Boutique -
World News 1 – Predictions -
Fall TV Special -
Spirit Walk in the Columbia Cemetery -
Boulder Mall Crawl -
Starlite Classic Car Show at the Boulder Hometown Festival -
Fall TV Special -
World News 1 – Suntans and Nuclear Power -
Warm Bodies – Movie Trailer -
Boulder Chamber Fall Events 2013 -
Robert Reich Interview – Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup -
Boulder Channel 1 Presents at Boulder New Tech Meetup -
Outro
CU scientists: New battery extends range and safety of electric-powered vehicles
Sep 22nd
A cutting-edge battery technology developed at the University of Colorado Boulder that could allow tomorrow’s electric vehicles to travel twice as far on a charge is now closer to becoming a commercial reality.
CU’s Technology Transfer Office has completed an agreement with Solid Power LLC—a CU-Boulder spinoff company founded by Se-Hee Lee and Conrad Stoldt, both associate professors of mechanical engineering—for the development and commercialization of an innovative solid-state rechargeable battery. Solid Power also was recently awarded a $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy for the purpose of creating a battery that can improve electric vehicle driving range.
The rechargeable batteries that are standard in today’s electric vehicles—as well as in a host of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops—are lithium-ion batteries, which generate electricity when lithium ions move back and forth between electrodes in a liquid electrolyte solution.
Engineers and chemists have long known that using lithium metal as the anode in a rechargeable battery—as opposed to the conventional carbon materials that are used as the anode in conventional lithium-ion batteries—can dramatically increase its energy density. But using lithium metal, a highly reactive solid, in conjunction with a liquid electrolyte is extremely hazardous because it increases the chance of a thermal runaway reaction that can result in a fire or an explosion.
Today’s lithium-ion batteries require a bulky amount of devices to protect and cool the batteries. A fire onboard a Boeing Dreamliner in January that temporarily grounded the new class of plane was linked to its onboard lithium-ion battery.
Lee and Stoldt solved the safety concerns around using lithium metal by eliminating the liquid electrolyte. Instead, the pair built an entirely solid-state battery that uses a ceramic electrolyte to separate the lithium metal anode from the cathode. Because the solid-state battery is far safer, it requires less protective packaging, which in turn could reduce the weight of the battery system in electric vehicles and help extend their range.
Research into the development of solid-state batteries has gone on for a couple of decades, but it has been difficult to create a solid electrolyte that allowed the ions to pass through it as easily as a liquid electrolyte.
“The problem has always been that solid electrolytes had very poor performance making their use in rechargeable batteries impractical,” Stoldt said. “However, the last decade has seen a resurgence in the development of new solid electrolytes with ionic conductivities that rival their liquid counterparts.”
The critical innovation added by Lee and Stoldt that allows their solid-state lithium battery to out-perform standard lithium-ion batteries is the construction of the cathode, the part of the battery that attracts the positively charged lithium ions once they’re discharged from the lithium metal. Instead of using a solid mass of material, Lee and Stoldt created a “composite cathode,” essentially small particles of cathode material held together with solid electrolyte and infused with an additive that increases its electrical conductivity. This configuration allows ions and electrons to move more easily within the cathode.
“The real innovation is an all-solid composite cathode that is based upon an iron-sulfur chemistry that we developed at CU,” Stoldt said. “This new, low-cost chemistry has a capacity that’s nearly 10 times greater than state-of-the-art cathodes.”
Last year, Lee and Stoldt partnered with Douglas Campbell, a small-business and early-stage product development veteran, to spin out Solid Power.
“We’re very excited about the opportunity to achieve commercial success for the all solid-state rechargeable battery,” said Campbell, Solid Power’s president. “We’re actively engaging industrial commercial partners to assist in commercialization and expect to have prototype products ready for in-field testing within 18 to 24 months.” Important to the early success of the company has been its incubation within CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science’s applied energy storage research center, a part of the college’s energy systems and environmental sustainability initiative.
Solid Power is a member of Rocky Mountain Innosphere, a nonprofit technology incubator headquartered in Fort Collins, Colo., with a mission to accelerate the development and success of high-impact scientific and technology startup companies.
“We’re very excited to be working with Solid Power’s team to get them to the next level,” said Mike Freeman, Innosphere’s CEO. “This is a big deal to Colorado’s clean-tech space. Solid Power’s batteries will have a huge impact in the EV market, and they have a potential $20 billion market for their technology.”
Learn more about Solid Power at http://www.solidpowerbattery.com.
-CU-