New Concepts for Renewable Energy Generation and Storage

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

6:30 to 9:00 pm, Kirsch Auditorium, Ray and Maria Stata Center

This event will open with a brief overview of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) by Daniel Enderton, Executive Director of MITEI’s Sustainable Energy Revolution Program, and will highlight the breadth of research, education, campus energy, and outreach activities underway as part of the Initiative. Following this, Professor Alex Slocum of Mechanical Engineering will provide a talk and discussion about his innovative research on new concepts for combined renewable energy generation and storage.

There are many different methods for renewable energy generation, and very few for large-scale efficient storage options other than pumped hydro. However, most renewable energy generation methods, such as wind or solar, are not dispatchable, and as their percentage of total generation capacity grows, so will the need for storage. Prof. Slocum will present two concepts for energy generation and storage: Concentrated Solar Power on demand (CSPond) and Offshore Renewable Energy System (ORES). CSPond uses a beam-down power tower which focuses the concentrated solar power through a small aperture into a volume of fluid where the energy is slowly absorbed with depth. The aperture acts as a thermal diode and hence very little heat escapes. OREs uses a cylindrical structure fixed to a sandy/muddy seafloor where the inside acts as a pumped hydro storage facility and the structure can be used to moor offshore wind turbines and/or ocean current turbines.

Alexander Slocum is currently the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT while simultaneously working from 1983-1985 at the National Bureau of Standards where he earned 12 superior service awards and a Department of Commerce Bronze Medal. He has six dozen patents issued/pending and designs manufacturing equipment for the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, and entertainment industries. He has been involved in several manufacturing equipment company start-ups, and he has helped many different companies bring many different machine tools to the marketplace. He has also been involved with 9 products that have been awarded R&D 100 awards, each for annually being one of one hundred most technologically significant new products, and he received the ASME Leonardo da Vinci Award for his work on kinematic couplings and the ASME Machine Design Award for his work on hydrostatic bearings and precision machine tools. His precision machine design interests range from MEMS to medical devices to machine tools, to renewable energy machines. The Slocum Lab website is http://pergatory.mit.edu.

Daniel Enderton is Executive Director of the MIT Energy Initiative’s Sustainable Energy Revolution Program, which seeks to coordinate and enhance support for breakthrough research in renewable energy sources—such as solar, wind, waves, geothermal, and bioenergy—as well as their associated enabling technologies, including storage and transmission. In 2008, Daniel defended his Ph.D. in climate physics and chemistry in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. His research focused on estimating and understanding the poleward transport of energy by the atmosphere and oceans, and how this partition affects surface climate conditions. As a student, Daniel was a Linden Earth System Fellow, 2007-2008 President of the MIT Energy Club, and Content Director for the 2007 and 2008 MIT Energy Conferences.

This energy event kicks off the MIT Club of Boston’s new series addressing the growing alumni interests in energy, environment, and sustainability.

Member, Club of Boston: $15.00

Current Student: $15.00

Non-Member: $25.00

Non-Alumnus Guest: $25.00

Register at https://alum.mit.edu/smarTrans/user/Register.dyn?eventID=37461&groupID=146