Northwestern University
AC-9: Academic Research

The Institute for Energy and Sustainability at Northwestern and the Office for Sponsored Research maintain an inventory of sustainability and energy related research underway. To supplement these inventories, we looked on department websites to find descriptions of faculty research areas. The office for research maintains information on the total research efforts within the university.

Northwestern University, its Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN), and Exelon Corporation announced today the formation of a five-year strategic research partnership focused on clean energy innovation. The Northwestern-Exelon Master Research Agreement will provide for an initial five-year period of research around a robust project portfolio, including grid management and resilience, energy storage and renewable technologies. The partnership is designed to streamline the process for evaluating, testing and scaling scientific discoveries made in Northwestern labs for commercial use. Discoveries in research could have immediate and tangible implications on the way energy is produced, transmitted and consumed in the United States. John M. Torkelson, a Walter P. Murphy Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, has found a solution to a common problem with rubber: it can’t be recycled. Torkelson and two of his Ph.D. students, Kailong Jin (Chem. Eng. ’17) and Lingqiao Li (Chem. Eng. ’19) have developed a simple, one-step strategy to solve this problem by modifying the way in which the polymers in rubber are linked. The research, supported by the McCormick Research Catalyst Awards Fund at Northwestern University and by discretionary funds associated with Torkelson’s Walter P. Murphy Professorship, will be detailed in an upcoming issue of Advanced Materials, and is currently available online as an early view article. In recent years, a class of highly absorbent, nanoporous materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as a promising material for carbon capture in power plants. But finding the optimal MOF to do the best job is another story. Randall Q. Snurr, who is the John G. Searle Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and his group have discovered a way to rapidly identify top candidates for carbon capture — using just 1 percent of the computational effort that was previously required. By applying a genetic algorithm, they rapidly searched through a database of 55,000 MOFs. Numerous other research teams and faculty are also focusing on sustainability in their research, notably exploring sustainable/renewable energy and storage solutions, solar cell development, and our entry into the 2017 U.S. DOE Solar Decathlon competition. Additional articles on these and other sustainability accomplishments at Northwestern University can be found on the ISEN news page at the following link: