Smith recognized for achievements in research

MechSE’s Kyle Smith was one of four associate professors to be awarded the 2026 Grainger College of Engineering Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research. This annual recognition honors associate professors for outstanding research based on their achievements during the past five years.

A core aspect of Smith’s research group has been the development of an electrochemical desalination process that he introduced in the literature in 2016 to desalinate seawater. The uniqueness of his work has been to achieve seawater desalination while producing potable water quality with low energy input — accomplished by addressing various bottlenecks in an interdisciplinary way.

His research lab is also focused on design and demonstration for flow distribution, with broad applications in flow-based electrochemical devices, thermal devices, and other fields. Smith’s decade of modeling and experiments had earlier culminated in a study demonstrating the first use of electrodes containing tiny microchannels called interdigitated flow fields (IDFFs).

Building on all of this work toward water desalination using battery-based processes, his group introduced a new process for electrochemical carbon capture from various gas feeds, and he has developed modeling and theory of transport phenomena in porous media, primarily motivated by the common use of porous electrodes in electrochemical devices. In recent years his group’s efforts in this regard have sought to bridge the disparate length- and time-scales that are inherent to electrochemical transport in porous electrodes. They have developed numerical methods for the simulation of redox flow batteries (RFBs) — electrochemical devices being touted for grid-scale energy storage.

Smith was recognized at the Engineering Awards Convocation on April 27.