Research

Through these projects and others, Mines faculty and students are giving Mines an upper hand in responding to the pandemic and its challenges.

Mines' Kathryn Johnson is co-leading the controls work for the innovative 10‐MW Ultraflexible Smart Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (USFLOWT).

[Editor's note: This article first appeared on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory website. ORNL has provided Mines Newsroom with permission to re-share it here.] By Jeremy Rumsey, Oak Ridge National

“This proof-of-concept work could provide a useful starting point for the design of future materials for reversible gas storage,” Mines PhD candidate James M. Crawford said.

As a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in STEM Education, Johnson plans to use her time at the University of Calgary to continue and expand her engineering education research.

"A critical challenge facing the practical implementation of fusion power is the effective and safe management of tritium," said Mines' Colin Wolden, lead investigator on the new $1.4 million ARPA-E project with Idaho National Laboratory.

Applied chemistry PhD student Sarah Zaccarine will be doing electrolyzer degradation studies at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of her graduate thesis research.

“The core of the existing relationship between Mines and NREL is materials science for renewable energy," said Ryan M. Richards, professor of chemistry and the Mines lead of Nexus. "Through this seed funding, we were able to create new connections from Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Petroleum Engineering, Civil Engineering."

In addition to monitoring and listening to ambient noise including the local construction work, the class hopes to record local and distant earthquakes from around the globe.

In findings published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Mines' Danica Roth and colleagues quantitatively showed – for the first time – just how the post-wildfire landscape can impact how sediment moves downslope.