Master of Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, Physics

The increasing adoption of renewable sources of electricity (i.e. wind and solar farms) is being driven by the demand for carbon neutral electricity production. Although zero carbon is emitted during electricity production, these renewable energy sources suffer from intermittency, which is a mismatch between the supply and demand of electricity of the grid. Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, produce their peak electricity at off-demand periods of the day. This strains the electrical grid as it risks over-generation in some locations as well as a need for quick ramping of the electrical load which is hard on electricity producing infrastructure. As a partial solution to intermittency, pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is the dominant form of grid-scale energy storage. PSH accounts for 95% of the U.S. grid-scale storage capacity, which amounts to 22.9 GW of capacity [1]. The EIA also estimates with all possible sites, the U.S. can double their PSH capacity [1]. However, much more than that is not feasible being constrained by the availability of locations suitable for PSH. As a result, other gridscale energy storage options are in development. The main options include batteries, thermal energy storage, compressed air energy storage (CAES) and flywheels. However, these storage options are plagued by high cost per kWh prices, location specificity (ex. PSH, CAES) and/or low energy density. With these concerns in mind, Cratus LLC is developing a molten salt thermal energy storage option known as ThermaBlox, which is location-independent, low-cost, and high-capacity (with the capability to scale). ThermaBlox will play a significant role in intermittency reduction while enabling increased adoption rates of renewable energy.

MS, University of Cincinnati, 2021, Engineering and Applied Science: Mechanical Engineering

In effort to both save operating expenses and be environmentally friendly, thermal energy storage provides a means for companies to handle daytime HVAC requirements while using off-peak (nighttime) electrical power. This paper sets out to compare three of the most common techniques used for thermal energy storage, by comparing both the analytical modeling of their energy storage and actual experimental data for their energy storage, using the same exact test apparatus for each of the techniques. The results of this experiment show that using normal HVAC temperatures, sensible water chilled to its maximum value after only about two hours, while PCM would take nearly six hours to achieve “linkage,” or solidified material merging between the helix coils. Ice building, done with -7° coolant, took 4.5 hours to achieve linkage. Initial heat transfer was proportional to the difference between initial tank temperature and the coolant temperature, and went asymptotically towards zero for sensible as the temperature of the tank and coolant reach equilibrium. For ice, the heat transfer rate was always more than twice that of PCM during latent storage, which is attributed to the difference between coolant temperatures and freezing points for the respective materials. Sensible water cooldown would require 232.8% of the tank volume to store the same energy relative to the environment compared to ice building, and 126.3% of the tank volume compared to phase change material. This is to be weighed with the benefit of using existing HVAC condensing units to chill the water, and the fact that water itself is inexpensive. The high latent heat of freezing for water meant it held more energy than both the water sensible cooldown and PCM freezing, but with the downside of requiring medium temperature condenser units in order to be efficient (instead of the high temperature units used in typical HVAC). After 4.5 hours, PCM would surpass the energy stored in the same volume as water sensi (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Computer Science and Engineering

The Internet age has exponentially increased the volume of digital media that is being shared and distributed. Broadband Internet has made technologies such as high quality streaming video on demand possible. Large scale supercomputers also consume and create huge quantities of data. This media and data must be stored, cataloged and retrieved with high-performance. Researching high-performance storage subsystems to meet the I/O demands of applications in modern scenarios is crucial. Advances in microprocessor technology have given rise to relatively cheap off-the-shelf hardware that may be put together as personal computers as well as servers. The servers may be connected together by networking technology to create farms or clusters of workstations (COW). The evolution of COWs has significantly reduced the cost of ownership of high-performance clusters and has allowed users to build fairly large scale machines based on commodity server hardware. As COWs have evolved, networking technologies like InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet have also evolved. These networking technologies not only give lower end-to-end latencies, but also allow for better messaging throughput between the nodes. This allows us to connect the clusters with high-performance interconnects at a relatively lower cost. With the deployment of low-cost, high-performance hardware and networking technology, it is increasingly becoming important to design a storage system that can be shared across all the nodes in the cluster. Traditionally, the different components of the file system have been stringed together using network connections. The protocol generally used over the network is TCP/IP. The TCP/IP protocol stack in general has been shown to have poor performance especially for high-performance networks. In this dissertation, we research the problem of designing high-performance communication subsystems for network attached storage (NAS) systems. Specifically, we delve i (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2007, Mechanical Engineering (Engineering)

Use of hydrogen as an automotive fuel has been successfully demonstrated for the use but they are not ready for consumers yet. One of the major problems associated with the use of hydrogen as an automotive fuel is the storage of hydrogen on-board. Hydrostatic Pressure Retainment (HPR) is an innovative gaseous storage concept which consists of a number of small hollow spherical bubbles arranged within a solid mass similar to a sponge-like structure. These spherical bubbles or the inner-matrix can be arranged in similar fashion as the three basic packing structures of crystalline metals: Simple Cubic (SC), Body Centered Cubic (BCC) and Face Centered Cubic (FCC). In a HPR vessel, suitable configuration for the inner-matrix and feasibility study of different materials is a crucial design step. This thesis investigates the feasibility of different materials for inner-matrix using an ideal BCC microstructure and also achieves one of the milestones of the HPR research by finding and analytically supporting the suitable configuration for the HPR inner-matrix, using Finite Element Analysis.

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2004, Mechanical Engineering (Engineering)

There is a great deal of attention being concentrated on reducing the weight of pressure vessels and fuel/oxidizer tanks (tankage) by 10% to 20%. Most efforts are focused at the use of new lighter weight high strength materials to achieve this goal. This author proposes another approach called Hydrostatic Pressure Retainment™ (HPR™) which has the potential of reducing tank weights by nearly 40% while simultaneously increasing safety and design versatility. HPR™ is an original invention of the author and his advisor, and represents a truly novel approach to light weight pressure vessel design. Described herein are the initial steps towards development of this new technology.

Master of Science in Renewable and Clean Energy Engineering (MSRCE), Wright State University, 2023, Renewable and Clean Energy

In the past several years, the energy sector has experienced a rapid increase in renewable energy installations due to declining capital costs for wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. Wind and solar electricity generation are intermittent in nature which must be considered in an economic analysis if a fair comparison is to be made between electricity supplied from renewables and electricity purchased from the grid. Energy storage reduces curtailment of wind and solar and minimizes electricity purchases from the grid by storing excess electricity and deploying the energy at times when demand exceeds the renewable energy supply. The objective of this work is to study the generation of electric power with wind turbines and solar panels coupled to either battery energy storage or hydrogen energy storage. So that logical conclusions can be drawn on the economic effectiveness of battery and hydrogen energy storage, four scenarios are analyzed: 1) purchasing all required electricity from the grid, 2) generating electricity with a combined wind and solar farm without energy storage, 3) generating electricity with a combined wind and solar farm with battery energy storage, and 4) generating electricity with a combined wind and solar farm with hydrogen energy storage. All four of these scenarios purchase electricity from the grid to meet demand that is not met by the renewable energy power plant. All scenarios are compared based on the lowest net present cost of supplying the specified electrical loads to serve 25,000 homes in Rio Vista, California over 25 years of operation. The detailed economics and electric power production of both wind and solar combined with energy storage for any size of wind facility, solar facility, battery facility, and hydrogen facility are analyzed with a MATLAB computer program developed for this work. The program contains technical and economic models of each of these systems working in different combinations. Current equipment c (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Computer Science and Engineering

The performance of scientific and analytic applications faces challenges as data volume and complexity have dramatically increased in past decades. Data management systems develop many techniques to optimize data storage layouts, thus speeding up the I/O procedure in these applications. Data partitioning and data placement are two representative techniques. Prior research splits a large object, such as a scientific array or a table, into many hyper-rectangular partitions. However, complex workloads expose non-rectangular access patterns that do not match with rectangular partitions. Furthermore, prior studies optimize the partitioning layout in a single data store. Modern systems often have diverse storage infrastructures, requiring a smart data placement strategy. Both data partitioning and placement decide the storage layout but prior studies consider them independently. This dissertation, therefore, matches the partitioning layout with the non-rectangular access pattern and jointly tunes data partitioning and data placement to maximize the I/O performance. As partitions of an object are placed and processed in a few data stores, a query on such an object is split into fragments executed separately. A significant challenge for the split execution is to reconstruct final answers efficiently. Stitching partitions incurs a massive amount of memory operations, especially for split SQL executions because relational operators return data in random orders. Sorting is one of the most expensive operators in RDBMSs. A slow reconstruction procedure easily offsets the benefit of optimized layouts. This dissertation makes four contributions to optimize the physical storage layout in scientific and analytic data management systems. The first contribution is a human-interpretable model to predict the end-to-end query evaluation time. The model is the foundation for comparing candidate layouts in optimization algorithms. The second contribution is an algorithm that jointly (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Chemistry

Increasing concerns about carbon emissions has led to the global adoption of renewable energy initiatives. Direct integration of renewable energy sources, however, is difficult because of the intermittency of such sources. Furthermore, direct integration would overload the grid and lead to blackouts. Thus, grid-scale electrical energy storage is required to store and provide energy on-demand. Redox flow batteries have attracted attention as a scalable, inexpensive storage technology. Flow batteries store energy in solvated, redox-active electrolytes, as opposed to conductive, solid materials. These solutions are stored in separated reservoirs and are flowed to the electrochemical cell to cycle the redox-active compound. Energy stored in this fashion decouples energy and power, which allow for increased operational control. While many electrolytes exist, few electrolyte examples have achieved commercialization because of low solubility and low cell voltage. Redox-targeting flow batteries have emerged as an improvement to classic flow technology. Rather than storing energy in solution, redox -targeting flow batteries store energy in an insoluble solid while a solubilized electrolyte serves to shuttle electrons from the electrochemical cell to the solid. This strategy serves to combine the high energy density of solid-state batteries and scalability of flow batteries. Current redox targeting technology is mainly limited to the use of inorganic solid materials. These materials are cycle by an intercalation mechanism, which requires low current densities that lead to long cycle times. Furthermore, pairing shuttles with these materials are difficult because of distinct redox potentials and electron transfer rates of these solids. Our efforts focused on the development of an all-organic redox targeting flow battery. Organic materials generally do not operate based on intercalation mechanisms and the synthetic flexibility of organic compounds allow for the fin (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Sciences (Engineering), Case Western Reserve University, 2018, Chemical Engineering

Inexpensive and scalable energy storage is necessary for the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable, electricity grid. The Acid-Base Energy Storage System (ABESS) utilizes an extremely inexpensive, safe, and abundant electrolyte, can be deployed anywhere without geographical constraints, and is predicted to be economical at very large energy storage capacities and long discharge times. The ABESS stores energy by utilizing the potential difference created by a proton (H+) concentration gradient in a saltwater electrolyte. The coulombic efficiency (ηC ) of an ABESS is unknown and it is crucial to understand for further development. In this thesis, the mass transport of the active species through Nafion® was measured and modeled in the charging of an ABESS under a high salt environment to determine ηC limitations. A macro-homogeneous model based on dilute solution theory utilizing Nernst-Planck equations was developed to relate ηC to the current density of an ABESS during charging. Effective diffusivities and transference numbers of sodium and active species under various electrolyte conditions were experimentally determined and reported for an ABESS operating with a concentrated saltwater electrolyte and a Nafion® separator. Using a Nafion®-212 membrane and a saturated sodium sulfate electrolyte at room temperature (∼1.5M Na2SO4 at 22°C ± 1.0°C), a maximum ηC of 86.7% ± 2.5% was measured during charging at 100 mA/cm2 up to a concentration of 0.5N Acid/Base in the respective reservoirs. These are promising results and show that a full battery will be able to achieve a 70% - 75% overall energy efficiency, comparable to other flow battery technologies.

Master of Science in Engineering, University of Akron, 2017, Civil Engineering

The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) uses approximately 700,000 tons of salt per year to keep their roads safe of icy conditions during the winter. Recently, ODOT has been experiencing extreme salt pricing in response to their county-by-county bid process. As a result, ODOT's annual cost for snow and ice removal reached approximately $86 million from its maintenance budget. The majority of expenses are accumulated by the procurement of rock salt. In order to identify recommendations for ODOT processes, a matrix of best and current practices was developed at the national, state, and city-level pertaining to winter maintenance. A thorough evaluation of variables which affect salt pricing was conducted. The transportation of salt as well as the delivery times were analyzed. It was concluded that winter salt orders, although modeled over $6.00 less expensive than summer, run a much higher risk of being delivered late. Therefore, a ten-step storage facility evaluation process was created to determine the vulnerability of a storage facility, the estimated cost to increase the capacity, and whether the facility may act as a regional storage location. This process gives ODOT the necessary tools to evaluate their storage facilities on a case-by-case basis due to the diverse environments such as weather found throughout the state of Ohio.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1984, Graduate School

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2011, Geological Sciences

Subtle shifts in the lithology or diagenetic history of a sedimentary formation may result in different reservoir properties of that formation, by affecting porosity and permeability in varied ways. This may create a geographic heterogeneity that will alter the accuracy of reservoir storage estimations of a formation. The Mt. Simon and Rose Run Sandstones of Ohio are both established as appropriate targets for the sequestration of supercritical CO2, but each of these formations may contain heterogeneities that are heretofore unaccounted for by standard well exploration. The porosity and permeability of these formations may differ based upon their local diagenetic histories. To account for these differences, the concentrations of quartz and feldspar within these sandstones offer evidence of diagenetic processes that have occurred in the past and those that may still occur in the future. Grain-size variations and any geographic trends they show can also be used as evidence of diagenetic variations that may indicate further heterogeneities that will affect the porosity and permeability of the formation on a local level. In this study, feldspar concentrations in both the Rose Run and Mt. Simon Sandstones are studied, on a microscopic level, and are shown to be extremely low with subtle variation of concentration based on location. Grain sizes of these formations also show subtle variations based on geographic location. Both results show that further study into the locally geographic differences of these formations will be necessary in order to accurately evaluate their storage capacity.

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2003, Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering (Engineering)

Order picking costs typically account for 50% of the operating costs in distribution center (DC) operations. Many DCs use a forward-reserve storage strategy to minimize these costs. This research is focused on minimizing replenishment costs while maintaining pick savings through a dock-to-forward (DTF) technique, which bypasses reserve storage to reduce additional handling. Four decision strategies for allocating SKUs to discretionary pick faces to utilize the DTF technique were developed and tested under typical distribution center conditions. Two additional strategies were tested: one strategy that used DTF only to meet that day's demand and one strategy that did not use the DTF technique. The method used to allocate SKUs to the forward pick area has a clear impact on the replenishment costs. The best-performing DTF strategy reduced replenishment trips by as much as 9% over a random strategy and by 24% over a system with no DTF.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2008, Chemistry and Biochemistry

Porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) represent a new type of functional materials and have been found to exhibit great potential in various applications such as catalysis, magnetism, gas storage/separation etc. This dissertation details the investigation of porous MOFs for gas adsorption applications, including hydrogen storage, methane storage, and selective gas adsorption. The first section evaluates porous MOFs as promising candidates for hydrogen storage application. It discusses various strategies to improve hydrogen uptakes in porous MOFs, which includes mimicking hemoglobin to create entatic metal centers in PCN-9 resulting in a high hydrogen heat of adsorption of 10.1 kJ/mol, functionalizing the organic ligand with fused aromatic rings to achieve high hydrogen adsorption capacity of 2.7 wt% in PCN-14 at 77 K and 1 bar, and utilizing catenation to generate PCN-6 with a hydrogen uptake of 9.5 wt% (absolute, at 77 K and 50 bar) as well as a surface area of 3800 m2/g in. The second section discusses methane storage applications of porous MOFs. Constructed from a pre-designed ligand, the porous MOF, PCN-14 exhibits the highest methane uptake capacity among currently reported materials with a value of 230 v/v (absolute, at ambient temperature and 35 bar), which is 28% higher than the US DOE target (180 v/v) for methane storage. The third section addresses microporous MOFs as molecular sieves for selective gas adsorption application. Increasing the bulkiness of the struts and introducing coordinatively linked interpenetration restrict the pore sizes of PCN-13 and PCN-17 respectively to scelectively adsorb oxygen and hydrogen over nitrogen and carbon monoxide. Based on some amphiphilic ligands, a series of mesh-adjustable molecular sieves, whose pore sizes can be continuously tuned from 2.9 to 5.0 angstrom, have been designed for various gas separation applications.

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2003, Technical and Scientific Communication

In January of 2000, I accepted a full-time position with Dell Inc. (formerly known as Dell Computer Corporation) located in Austin, Texas. This report describes the first 18-months of my tenure at Dell and focuses on a major project I completed during this time. I began this project in January 2001 and completed it in March 2001. The other chapters in this report provide a description of Dell Inc., an overview of my internship and my major and minor writing projects, an analysis of the problem-solving model, and some examples of the technical writing assignments that I developed at Dell.

Master of Science (M.S.), University of Dayton, 2011, Chemical Engineering

The specific energy storage capacities of phase change materials (PCMs) increase with temperature, leading to a lack of thermal management (TM) systems capable of handling high heat fluxes in the temperature range from 20°C to 100°C. State of the art PCMs in this temperature range are usually paraffin waxes with energy densities on the order of a few hundred kJ/kg or ice slurries with energy densities of the same magnitude. However, for applications where system weight and size are limited, it is necessary to improve this energy density by at least an order of magnitude. The compound ammonium carbamate (AC), [NH4 ][H2NCOO], is a solid formed from the reaction of ammonia and carbon dioxide which endothermically decomposes back to ammonia and carbon dioxide in the temperature range of 20°C to 100°C with an enthalpy of decomposition of 2,010 kJ/kg. Various methods to use this material for TM of low-grade, high-flux heat have been evaluated including: bare powder, thermally conductive carbon foams, thermally conductive metal foams, hydrocarbon based slurries, and a slurry in ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. A slurry in glycol is a promising system medium for enhancing heat and mass transfer for TM. Small-scale system level characterizations of AC in glycol have been performed and results indicate that AC is indeed a promising material for TM of low-grade heat. It has been shown that pressures on the order of 200 torr will achieve rapid decomposition and thermal powers of over 300 W at 60°C have been found, demonstrating the capability of AC.

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2013, EMC - Mechanical Engineering

During the past forty years, the number of large retail stores (often referred to as big-box stores) has grown significantly. These stores incorporate steel pallet storage racks loaded with heavy merchandise which pose a life-safety risk to the exposed general public during a seismic event. A base isolation system compatible with conventional racks is designed and developed which provides seismic isolation primarily in the cross-aisle direction. The new patented base isolation system provides seismic isolation by incorporating heavily damped elastomeric bearings (referred to here as seismic mounts) and low-friction bearing plates. The objective of the base isolation system is to reduce horizontal accelerations of the rack to eliminate product shedding and structural damage during a major earthquake without interfering with normal, day-to-day material handling operations. Full scale shake table testing show the new base isolation system meets the performance objectives recommended in the FEMA-460 document “Seismic Considerations for Steel Storage Racks Located in Areas Accessible to the Public” for both life safety under the Design Earthquake (DE) and for collapse prevention under the Maximum Considered Earthquake (MCE). Special heavily damped (HD) butyl compounds are developed and utilized in the seismic mounts. These compounds are statically and dynamically characterized which provides input data for numerical studies. Non-linear hyperelastic material models are developed and used with finite element analysis to design various base isolation systems. Several of these new base isolation systems are optimized to achieve characteristics that expand their use from lightly loaded racks to heavily loaded racks. Designs are further optimized based on feedback from shake table testing and transient structural analysis. The new base isolation system is evaluated by uniaxial and triaxial shake table tests performed at the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simu (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2024, Chemical Engineering

Lowering energy-related CO2 emissions of the U.S. requires the implementation of renewable energy sources to generate electricity. These sources, e.g. solar and wind power, are intermittent in their output, necessitating some form of grid-scale energy storage. Redox flow batteries, particularly hybrid flow batteries based on zinc (Zn), are a highly attractive solution due to their high energy density, scalability, earth-abundance of Zn, and usage of safer aqueous electrolytes as opposed to flammable organics. However, Zn has notable problems such as forming dendrites during high-rate deposition and spontaneous corrosion in acidic and alkaline electrolytes leading to substantial self-discharge of a battery over time. To address these issues, significant research has been conducted on electrolyte additives that can suppress dendrite formation and prevent corrosion, but many of these conventional additives also polarize the electrode and harm battery energy-efficiency. In the present work, a novel additive, benzyldimethylhexadecylammonium chloride (BDAC), is shown to markedly suppress Zn corrosion (battery self-discharge) rate in a pH = 3 ZnSO4 medium without harming (i.e., by minimizing overpotential losses) the high-rate deposition or stripping performance of Zn. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) measurements show BDAC induces hysteresis, where the electrode can either exhibit passivity or electrochemical activity at a given electrode potential depending on the scan direction. The hysteresis is a result of complex surface adsorption and deactivation behavior of BDAC on Zn. An additive adsorption-deactivation model is proposed which captures above behavior and shows that, at low current densities (i.e. low BDAC deactivation rates), the electrode surface tends towards full additive coverage while, at higher deposition or stripping rates (i.e. rapid BDAC deactivation), the electrode surface tends towards a coverage depending on the additive's adsorption and deactivatio (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2024, Mechanical Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

In recent years, lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have played an essential role in nowadays energy storage system, especially electric vehicles (EVs) and portable electronics because of its high energy density and long cycle life [1, 2]. However, one of the biggest challenges is how to guarantee their dependability and trustworthiness. In the present investigation, Acoustic Emission (AE) and Ultrasound Testing (UT) techniques are systematically employed to verify probable critical defects in the LIBs. Where AE technology is able to record the stress waves produced by the growth of the defects, UT uses high-frequency sound waves to penetrate the batteries and provide an indication of the internal voids. The performances of these approaches were systematically tested on as-received, pre-damaged and cold-soaked batteries. Different AE and UT activity patterns were shown in the results under various environmental conditions that influenced battery performance. Combining Acoustic Emission (AE) and Ultrasound Testing (UT) with clustering and outlier analysis machine learning algorithms improved defect detection effectiveness. Such research highlights that AE and UT can be robust noninvasive techniques for on-line health monitoring of LIBs that should aid in maintaining the longevity and operability of LIBs.

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1969, Graduate School