MechSE alumni lend their research to innovations in energy storage

Two MechSE alumni and former members of Associate Professor Kyle Smith’s research group have since brought their expertise to eco-conscious energy storage startups.

Research and development engineer Aniruddh Shrivastava (PhD ME 2021) earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in energy systems engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, before coming to Illinois.

“I knew that energy storage was going to be very relevant in the future, especially for renewable energy,” Shrivastava recalled of making the decision to move from solar cell to energy storage research for his PhD. Smith’s focus on using batteries for water desalination piqued Shrivastava’s interest.

Shrivastava fondly remembers the first research paper he published as first author with Smith. “It struck us that the result we were expecting had been staring at us for the past few weeks, and we never realized it.,” he recalled of planning the paper, which focused on Prussian blue (i.e., ferric ferrocyanide) analogue porous electrodes.

During his doctoral work, Shrivastava took an internship position at Natron Energy. Founded in 2012 and based out of California, Natron is the world’s first commercial sodium-ion battery manufacturer. Its Holland, Michigan, mass-scale sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant is also the first of its kind in North America. Following his graduation, Shrivastava accepted a full-time role at Natron in R&D.

His current work focuses on process engineering for high-volume manufacturing of Natron’s sodium ion batteries, which can replace lithium-ion batteries in most applications apart from electric vehicles. These batteries are especially impactful for data centers that need to mitigate the potential for power failure. Even one instant of power loss could majorly disrupt supercomputing processes, meaning that the transition of power flow between the grid and backup generators must be seamless. Natron’s batteries, which offer a safer, longer-lasting alternative to lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, can facilitate this transition through a two- to three-minute, high-powered discharge before regaining full charge in 15 minutes. By eliminating the possibility of thermal runaway, these batteries can also make industrial power and grid storage safer.

“MechSE students have certain advantages that can set them up well for working in this field,” Shrivastava said, noting that the department’s broad curriculum allows students to learn electrochemistry, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and behavior of materials, all of which are relevant to energy storage innovation. “It’s a very interdisciplinary process to go from identifying [battery] materials to assembling the final product.”

As a student, electrochemical researcher Erik Reale (PhD ME 2021), who also earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MechSE, shared a similar interest in Smith’s focus on desalination technology.

“We were able to significantly desalinate a small reservoir of water with salinity comparable to sea water,” Reale recalled of his time in the lab. “That was the big accomplishment that capped off my work with [Smith].”

Reale then took a postdoctoral research position at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California before returning to Illinois to join the Chicago-based startup Influit Energy.

“We’re working on a new form of flowing electrode batteries that allow the user to swap out battery fluid instead of recharging through the power grid,” Reale said. “In this way, an electric vehicle, whether it’s a car or train or aircraft, could be refueled much more rapidly.”

Traditional batteries rely on active materials stored in irremovable, solid, porous electrodes which must be recharged upon depletion. Influit’s proprietary nanoelectrofuel (NEF) design suspends nanoparticles in a low-viscosity fluid in such a way that the active materials can flow in and out of the battery, allowing large volumes of active material to be charged and stored outside of the device it powers.

Influit is the first company to develop an energy-storing nanofluid that achieves both low viscosity and perfect suspension of battery material. Because its NEF can be pumped directly into the battery casing, Influit’s refueling process resembles that of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, albeit with a key difference: discharged NEF is pumped from the electric vehicle for recharge. The company has garnered contracts with the United States Air Force, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy (DOE), among others.

Outside of research, Reale is the author of the science fiction novel Forging a Second Sun and is currently working on the sequel. He also found enthusiasm for teaching while working as a teaching assistant at Illinois. “I greatly enjoyed helping out students as much as I could, making sure that they learned as much about mechanical engineering as I could teach them,” he said of the opportunity to mentor. “It was a pretty rewarding experience.”