NSF RII Track 2: Collaborative Research for Cyberinfrastructure-enabled Computational Nanoscience For Energy Technologies

Principal Investigator: F. Fred Choobineh
Co-PIs: Evgeny Tsymbal, David Swanson
Award #EPS-1010674

The National Science Foundation has awarded Nebraska EPSCoR a 3-year, $6 million joint award with Puerto Rico to expand cyberinfrastructure and facilitate advanced collaborations that explore nanomaterials for energy efficiency. Nebraska's share of the award is $3.3 million.

The goal of the research is to create and explore nanomaterials that could be used by the electronics industry to improve energy efficiency. A second emphasis of the research will be on nanocatalysts for energy applications. Catalysts are used to speed up chemical reactions, and researchers hope that nanocatalysts could help key chemical reactions, namely those used in hydrogen fuel cells.

The research will be conducted collaboratively using an advanced web portal that will be created for the purpose of this project, but will be available for other types of research in the future. A consortium of computational scientists from Nebraska and Puerto Rico will develop an open source code library for collaborative research on nanomaterials, which will enable the Consortium to bring the maximum talent to bear on the problems of energy efficiency.

Cyberconnectivity will be upgraded between University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the Puerto Rican Institute for Functional Nanomaterials (IFN), creating a more advanced computational environment.

For several years, the University of Nebraska's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) has been collaborating with Puerto Rico's IFN through student and faculty exchanges. The chief NU scientist on this project is Dr. Evgeny Y. Tsymbal, Charles Bessey Professor of Physics and director of the MRSEC at the University of Nebraska.

University of Nebraska's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center

University of Puerto Rico's Institute for Functional Nanomaterials