Currently CESTAR is organized around 4 specific energy thrust areas:

• Fusion Energy
  This thrust area on the science and technology for future fusion energy producing reactors is headed by Professor Mohamed Abdou. Fusion energy research currently underway includes:
  • liquid metal and molten salt blanket cooling and magnetohydrodynamic behavior (Morley)
  • free surface liquid metal flows for divertor protection and particle pumping (Ying, Morley)
  • solid breeder and neutron multiplier materials thermomechanical behavior (Ying)
  • neutron and photon transport modeling (Youssef)
  • test blanket development for ITER (Abdou, Ying, Morley)
  • fusion plasma diagnostics (Peebles)
  
  
  
• Hydrogen
  Hydrogen-based transportation is a strategy that can yield significant reductions in air emissions of toxic substances, and thus accord significant health benefits to the residents of Southern California, the United States, and the world as a whole. The Hydrogen Engineering Research Consortium (HERC) at UCLA aims to bring together the expertise of both academic and industrial resources to help bring about the onset of the Hydrogen economy.
  
  With the price of oil over $50 per barrel and the concomitant increase of gasoline prices to $2.50 per gallon in California, consumers are starting to reduce their driving and are looking for alternative transportation solutions. Major energy providers also view the use of hydrogen powered fuel cells as the most sustainable mobility solution in the long run. The strongest argument for the use of hydrogen as transportation fuel, however, is the inability of our cities’ current transportation systems to prevent the emission of large amounts of toxic substances.
  
  
• Materials for Energy Applications
  In the materials for energy thrust, we work on a broad range of advanced materials. The current focus is power generation by polymer solar cells. These plastic cells potentially cost little to fabricate and are convenient to install and maintain. The other major effort is focused on new materials for energy storage, such as advanced batteries and hydrides. The current research spans from new materials to device architectures, including:
  • Synthesis of new polymer semiconductors with small band gap and high carrier mobility
  • Polymer blends to form bulk heterojunctions for efficient charge separation
  • Polymer-inorganic hybrids to complement polymers' hole mobility with the high electron mobility of nanostructured inorganic semiconductors
  • Nanostructured polymer solar cells
  • Novel transparent electrode material
  • Tandem cells to boost overall power conversion efficiency
  • Nanostructured energy storage materials.
  • Computational design of new materials for hydrogen storage
  • Theory of fundamental processes in energy storage materials
• Energy Conversion and Conservation

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