Throughout the past couple of years, I have worked in Dr. Eric Detsi’s lab studying nanoporous metals and catalysts, areas of research that have implications for energy storage and conversion.

This past summer, I had the privilege of being funded by CURF’s Jumpstart for Juniors Program, which allowed me to pursue my research project focusing on understanding nanoporous materials and their utility for energy conversion and storage purposes. Specifically, I worked on understanding how nickel-iron-manganese alloys can be used to catalyze both oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), which are critical to rechargeable batteries, reversible fuel cells, and other energy applications.

During the spring semester of 2020, I had begun analyzing some samples in the lab before the COVID-19 pandemic. I placed several nickel-iron-manganese alloys into acid baths under different conditions to yield final samples that differed in their ratio of nickel to iron to manganese. The acid bath “dealloys” the sample, which in this particular situation means that manganese was removed. Altering the concentration of the acid and duration of the alloy’s acid bath affected the amount of manganese that was removed. Dealloying also gives the alloy a nanoporous structure (pores that are on the scale of nanometers). Each one of these samples was tested to determine its efficacy at catalyzing both OER and ORR.

I was able to analyze all of the data collected remotely. The preliminary results showed that in some cases, the nickel-iron-manganese alloys were able to simultaneously catalyze OER and ORR, which has promising industry applications such as rechargeable batteries. The amount of manganese, however, must be optimized to exhibit this bifunctional behavior. For example, any sample with too little manganese failed to exhibit ORR and any sample with too much manganese failed to exhibit OER.

Afterwards, I used simulations to begin to model the way light could interact with such nanoporous materials, which could perhaps yield results pertinent to other applications. I started off by using the software COMSOL to create a simple spherical nanoparticle and determine how it could interact with light. The future step would be to simulate a more advanced geometry and eventually get to the nanoporous nickel-iron-manganese alloy.

Through this research experience I was able to gain valuable knowledge about data analysis and computational work. Analyzing the data from the nickel-iron-manganese alloys allowed me to learn how cyclic voltammetry works, which is essential not only to this project, but also has many other uses in electrochemistry. I also learned how to read the curves that cyclic voltammetry generates when running tests. Lastly, I got thorough experience working with a computational modeling software COMSOL, which was a good introduction into computer modelling and simulations.