Asegun Henry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Engineering
Heat is at the center of almost every energy technology, and controlling it well is one route to storing and using renewable electricity. This award supports research spanning two connected scales.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
phonon transport
heat transfer
thermal transport
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Advance understanding of phonon transport, the atomic vibrations that carry heat, in disordered materials whose atoms lack a regular repeating arrangement, using advanced computational approaches.
- Characterize how heat crosses interfaces between dissimilar materials at the atomistic scale, where conventional descriptions of thermal conduction break down.
- Develop concepts for storing excess renewable electricity as thermal energy in molten silicon and converting it back to electricity on demand using photovoltaics.
- Extend high-temperature energy conversion hardware, building on an all-ceramic mechanical pump that moves liquid metal above 1400 degrees Celsius.
More about the research
At the smallest scale, the work studies how heat actually travels through materials by tracking phonons, the vibrations of atoms in a solid that carry thermal energy. At the largest scale, it addresses how to store renewable energy and convert it back to electricity at very high temperatures.
Why it matters
Renewable electricity from sources such as wind and sun is intermittent, so cheap, large-scale storage is a central obstacle to using more of it. Storing surplus electricity as heat in molten silicon and converting it back with photovoltaics could offer such a route, and high-temperature pumping hardware is a prerequisite for building it. Better atomic-level understanding of how heat moves through disordered materials and across interfaces also informs the design of energy conversion devices generally.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jivtesh Garg
University of Oklahoma, OK·Engineering
Test whether evanescent electric fields across 2–4 Å interfacial gaps help acoustic phonons, the lattice vibrations that carry heat, cross GaN–diamond interfaces, using atomistic Green's function calculations.
Yan Wang
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how wave-like phonons, atomic vibrations that carry heat, travel, scatter and become trapped in periodic, quasi-periodic and aperiodic structures, combining spectral phonon analysis with phonon spectroscopy.
Xianfan Xu
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Develop theory for how radiative heat transport by hyperbolic phonon polaritons, light-lattice vibration waves, inside hyperbolic materials depends on wavelength and temperature.
The school
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 25 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 692 research doctorates a year.
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