Energy

Exploring Colorado’s untapped geothermal energy potential

Charles Ferrer — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:58:24 +0000

Exploring Colorado’s untapped geothermal energy potential Charles Ferrer Tue, 10/21/2025 - 12:58

A major question looms over Colorado’s energy future: why does geothermal energy, a renewable resource, remain virtually untapped? ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researchers will examine the technological and social barriers that have held back geothermal development in the state.

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Sharafuddin earns Ryland Graduate Fellowship for control theory research

Charles Ferrer — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:28:17 +0000

Sharafuddin earns Ryland Graduate Fellowship for control theory research Charles Ferrer Mon, 10/06/2025 - 10:28

Evan Sharafuddin, a first-year electrical engineering PhD student, has been selected as the recipient of the Dwight E. and Jessica D. Ryland Graduate Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year who is pursuing wind turbine control research.

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Building community around electrochemistry and energy innovation

Susan Glairon — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:26:41 +0000

Building community around electrochemistry and energy innovation Susan Glairon Sat, 09/13/2025 - 09:26

Co-organized by Professor Mike Toney, the 2025 Front Range Electrochemistry Workshop (FREW) broadly addressed electrochemical science, with this year’s focus on batteries reflecting their growing importance to everything from electric vehicles to renewable energy infrastructure.

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Power electronics researchers awarded $1.5M to advance energy technologies

Charles Ferrer — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 20:18:29 +0000

Power electronics researchers awarded $1.5M to advance energy technologies Charles Ferrer Thu, 09/11/2025 - 14:18

Luca Corradini, associate professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, is advancing energy technologies at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� thanks to a $1.5 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

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Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:29:48 +0000

Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research Jeff Zehnder Thu, 03/13/2025 - 12:29

Jeff Zehnder

Alireza Doostan is leading a major effort for real-time data compression for supercomputer research.

A professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Doostan is the principal investigator on a $1.2 million Department of Energy project to change how researchers handle the massive amounts of data that result from complex physics problems like modeling turbulence and aerodynamics for air and space craft.

Compressing data is nothing new when it comes to computing, but advances in high- performance systems are now creating so much data that it becomes impossible to store for later analysis.

“Computing power has increased drastically, but moving and storing that data is becoming a bottleneck. We have to reduce the size of the data generated through large scale simulation codes,” Doostan said.

While some scientific analysis of turbulence flows can be completed faster on ever larger high-performance computing platforms, much of the information must be discarded because the scope of the data is too vast to store, making it impossible to conduct later assessments.

“There is a lot of structure and physics embedded in the data that ideally needs to be preserved to study complex flow physics or develop faster models,” Doostan said.

The goal of the grant is to both maintain accuracy of modeling data while decreasing its complexity, and critically, allowing it to be stored by compressing it in-situ, or in real-time as it is created during modeling. This is not currently possible for large-scale models, as existing technology often requires some or the entire modeling simulation be completed before compression can begin.

Joining Doostan on the project is a team of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� faculty, including Ken Jansen and John Evans, both also from Smead Aerospace, and Stephen Becker from applied math.

The team is focused on development of both traditional and deep neural models for massively parallel implementation of novel linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques. It is a major undertaking, bringing together researchers with a broad range of backgrounds, including computational physics and sciences, discretization, machine learning, linear algebra, and statistics.

“This is a very interdisciplinary problem,” Doostan said. “This is not a problem one person can solve. You need a team.”

For Jansen, whose research focuses on turbulence modeling, an advance in compression could lead to significant progress across the spectrum of high-performance computing.

“This data compression research is critically important to provide access to the dynamics of our simulations,” Jansen said. “As simulations have passed petascale and are now exascale, it has become impractical to write the full solution fields to disk at a sufficient frequency and count, owing to the broad range of spatial and temporal scales of turbulence.”

The group has completed soon-to-be-published research showing strong promise for their approach. They are now working to scale up their algorithms to work at scale on supercomputing platforms like ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Blanca cluster as well as Department of Energy systems.

“There is still a lot to be done, but our early work has shown success and only increases the computational load by less than five percent,” Doostan said.

The three-year award runs through fall 2027. Doostan is hopeful their final product will include publicly available next-generation compression software for general use by all simulation practitioners.

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5 ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� startups to watch in 2025

Michelle Wiese — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:12:41 +0000

5 ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� startups to watch in 2025 Michelle Wiese Mon, 02/03/2025 - 10:12

From July 2023 to June 2024, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� helped to launch 35 new companies based on research at the university. The new businesses are embracing technologies from the worlds of healthcare, agriculture, clean energy and more. Here’s a look at how engineers and scientists, with the help of the university’s commercialization arm Venture Partners, seek to use discoveries from the lab to make a difference in peoples’ lives.

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Lucy Pao earns IEEE award for advancements in wind turbine control systems

Charles Ferrer — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:42:34 +0000

Lucy Pao earns IEEE award for advancements in wind turbine control systems Charles Ferrer Tue, 01/28/2025 - 11:42

Lucy Pao was honored by the IEEE Control Systems Society for advancing research in wind turbine control systems. Her IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award recognized the work with her former PhD student Michael N. Sinner, now a researcher at NREL and collaborators from ForWind – Center for Wind Energy Research in Germany.

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Pioneering sodium-ion batteries: a sustainable energy alternative

Charles Ferrer — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:12:55 +0000

Pioneering sodium-ion batteries: a sustainable energy alternative Charles Ferrer Mon, 11/11/2024 - 10:12

Charles Ferrer

Kangmin working in the battery glovebox under the direction of Dr. Ban.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researchers are exploring the use of sodium-ion batteries as an alternative to lithium-based energy storage.

While sodium is abundant and could help address supply chain issues linked to lithium scarcity, current sodium-ion batteries have not performed as well as lithium-ion batteries due to their lower energy density and shorter lifespans.

To tackle these challenges, Chunmei Ban, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, and her research team are developing new electrolytes and studying how they interact with battery electrodes to enhance performance and longevity.

Funded by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, this work aims to improve the overall effectiveness of sodium-ion batteries making them a more viable energy storage option.

Ban notes that sodium, widely distributed in the Earth’s crust, is an appealing candidate for large-scale energy storage solutions and is an emerging market in the United States.

“The sodium-ion battery market provides significant opportunities for new companies and a pathway to domestic manufacturing dominance,” said Ban. “Sodium may offer a potential remedy to concerns over resource scarcity with lithium-ion batteries.”

Researching battery alternatives

Kangmin Kim, a fourth-year chemical engineering student and BOLD Scholar, participated in the research project through CU SPUR gaining hands-on experience in hopes to further his research interest in battery technologies for graduate school.

“Lithium battery technology is reaching a point where improvements are becoming more incremental than transformative,” said Kim, “so we need alternative renewable technologies that we can rely on.”

Kangmin completes a summer research experience on sodium-ion batteries.

He believes improved battery technology is essential for advancing society and fostering a more sustainable energy future.

“We will need these improved battery technologies for everything from electric vehicles to drones and cell phones,” he said.

Through Kim’s research experience, he developed battery fabrication skills and learned the importance of precision and attention to detail in creating high-quality batteries.

“The lab work was actually quite similar to cooking, which is an activity I love to do,” said Kim. “Knowing what ingredients we need, what precautions must be taken, what tools and techniques are used are just like working in the lab.”

In mentoring students like Kim, Ban highlights how fulfilling it is to work with students who demonstrate a strong passion for science and technology and eagerness to learn.

“It has been a rewarding experience to witness undergraduate students like Kangmin grow their research and scientific skills in helping to solve some of our major global challenges.”

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researchers are exploring the use of sodium-ion batteries as an alternative to lithium-based energy storage.

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Energy

Exploring Colorado’s untapped geothermal energy potential

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Sharafuddin earns Ryland Graduate Fellowship for control theory research

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Building community around electrochemistry and energy innovation

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Power electronics researchers awarded $1.5M to advance energy technologies

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Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research

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5 ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ startups to watch in 2025

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Lucy Pao earns IEEE award for advancements in wind turbine control systems

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Pioneering sodium-ion batteries: a sustainable energy alternative

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5 ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� startups to watch in 2025