Energy Applications

RASEI Fellow Kat Knauer selected as a 2026 Gilbreth Lecturer

Daniel Morton — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:36:05 +0000

RASEI Fellow Kat Knauer selected as a 2026 Gilbreth Lecturer Daniel Morton Wed, 01/28/2026 - 09:36

Daniel Morton

The Gilbreth Lectures recognize early-career engineers and provides a platform to share their work broadly with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Community.

The Gilbreth lectures were established in 2001 by the Council of the National Academy of Engineering as a means of recognizing outstanding young American engineers and making them more visible to NAE members. Recipients of the lectureships are nominated from The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering program and are given the opportunity to make presentations at the NAE’s fall Annual Meetings and spring National Meetings.

The Gilbreth Lectureships are named in honor of Lillian Gilbreth, the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1965. Lillian was a pioneer in the field of Human Factors, often considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist, whose research helped industrial engineers recognize the importance of the psychological dimensions of work.

Kat’s selection was based on her talk at the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium on “AI-Driven Plastic Redesign for Recyclable Materials”. Congratulations to Kat, and we look forward to hearing about the presentations!

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The case of the vanishing seeds: How curiosity-driven research is future-proofing “Smart Windows”

Daniel Morton — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:02:14 +0000

The case of the vanishing seeds: How curiosity-driven research is future-proofing “Smart Windows” Daniel Morton Tue, 01/27/2026 - 10:02

Daniel Morton

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Have you ever walked into a room on a glorious Colorado summer day and felt the heat radiating through the glass?

We usually solve this by cranking up the air conditioning or closing the blinds, losing our mountain view in the process. But what if the window itself could think? A team led by Mike McGehee, a Fellow at RASEI, describes research that improves the robustness of such a device.

For years researchers have been working on “smart windows”, devices that could “sense” the conditions outside and “react” to them. This investigation centers around a promising technology called Reversible Metal Electrodeposition (RME). The technical details of this process are complex, but you can understand the concept by thinking of it as a reversible coat of paint. At the flip of a switch, a thin layer of metal, in this case silver, spreads across the glass to form a layer that tints it, blocking out the heat and the glare. Flip the switch again and the silver dissolves back into a clear liquid, making the window transparent.

Buildings are responsible for consuming around 40% of all generated energy globally, much of which is expended in regulating the temperature, heating and cooling the building interior. Installing smart windows that can react to the environmental conditions could provide a very effective mechanism to reduce energy use and slash energy bills by automatically managing how much heat enters a room. It has been estimated that just by controlling the amount of sunlight that is let into a building through a window, we could cut energy bills by up to as much as 20%.

However, there have been a number of challenges to overcome in order to take this initial discovery from the lab to a product that can be deployed for use in buildings. One challenge is that early versions of these windows started out fast but grew “lazy” over time. After a few thousand uses the tinting / de-tinting process slowed, taking almost four times longer than it did on day one.

This is where the researchers undertook some detailed investigations to identify what was going on, and what could be done to fix it. A collaboration between the McGehee group (at the University of Colorado Boulder) and the Barile Group (at the University of Nevada) set out to find out exactly what was happening. The team decided to look closer, using a combination of high-powered x-rays and electrochemical tests. The windows were using tiny “seeds” of platinum to help the silver grow on the glass. Platinum is recognized for being tough and non-reactive, and so should be perfect as a nucleation point for the silver. Using these advanced techniques the team explored exactly what was happening to the platinum seeds during the clearing phase, when the silver “paint” is stripped away.

To their surprise, the platinum was not as tough as they initially thought. In the special liquid environment needed for the windows, the platinum seeds were actually dissolving and washing away when the window was switched to clear. As the number of seeds dropped, the silver had fewer locations to grow from, which was the cause behind the window tinting slowing.

Daniel Morton — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:26:55 +0000

The Filament Factory: How two specialized cells team up to build microscopic rock and drive carbon capture Daniel Morton Mon, 01/05/2026 - 10:26

Daniel Morton

In the tiny, beaded chain of the cyanobacterium Anabaena sp. ATCC 33047, two different cells, the photosynthetic factory worker and the nitrogen-fixing specialist, play distinct and powerful roles in creating solid minerals.

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A team led by Renewable And Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) Fellow Jeff Cameron and Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio co-founder Erin Espelie, used advanced high-resolution microscopy to capture the key moments; the factory worker leaks materials when stressed, and the specialist accelerates crystal growth through contact, proving that single-cell behaviors are a vital trigger for biomineralization. Understanding the cellular processes could inform large-scale applications, from oceanic buffering and soil improvement to mineral formation, and living building materials that sequester carbon.

A central enabling technology to lower pollution and reduce carbon emissions is developing clever ways to capture, and handle carbon dioxide. One avenue of investigation is to use processes already developed by Nature. There is significant research focused on using one of the Earth’s oldest and powerful processes: Microbiologically Induced Calcium Carbonate Precipitation, or MICP for short. Bacteria and algae through their normal life functions naturally create rock, specifically calcium carbonate, the main component of limestone. This process is a critical process in oceanic buffering and holds immense potential promise for green technologies. If we can understand, and harness this process, we could use such bacteria for a broad range of applications. We could create “living” cements for self-healing concrete, stabilize fragile soils, even enhance industrial carbon dioxide sequestration. However, to control this process we first need to understand the specific cellular blueprints that guide these microbial construction projects. Until now, those blueprints have been frustratingly fuzzy.

To better understand the puzzle of biomineralization the team explored the cellular structure of the cyanobacteria Anabaena sp. ATCC 33047 (hereafter Anabaena). Think of this organism as a tiny “Filament Factory”, one that grows as a string of cells, essentially a beaded green chain (they show up as red in the images because of the microscopy technique), where labor is divided in specific jobs. The links in the chain are not identical, it contains two specialized cell types that perform distinct, but equally important tasks.

First, let’s consider the Vegetative Cells, which are like tireless “Photosynthetic Factory Workers”. These are the green, abundant cells with the primary job of harvesting solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into sugars (Photosynthesis). This process has long been proposed as the main cause for triggering rock formation through MICP, as it raises the local pH, making the environment more alkaline, which encourages calcium carbonate to precipitate.

The other kind of cells, which can be found scattered along the filament, are called Heterocysts. These are like “Nitrogen-Fixing Specialists”. These cells are slightly larger, more solidly built, and specialize in converting atmospheric nitrogen gas into a usable form for the entire filament. This requires an extremely lo-oxygen environment, distinguishing the heterocysts and giving them a significant influence over the cells surrounding chemical environment.

To understand the process in a stepwise fashion the team were able to treat the bacterial system with a specific nutrient cocktail that essentially “turned off” the generalized photosynthesis-driven precipitation and instead focus solely on the effects of these two specialized cells. By developing approaches to shutdown specific parts of the process the team could use advanced microscopy techniques to better pin-point the single-cell behaviors responsible for triggering the formation and growth of microscopic rock.

Unlocking this level of detail in the cellular workings of a cyanobacteria requires specialized tools. The researchers used a suites of powerful high-resolution techniques to interrogate the bacteria, including Quantitative Fluorescence Microscopy and Raman Microscopy, that enabled them to watch the action unfold. The ability to directly observe the single-cell processes was critical to determining how the “Filament Factory” uses two distinct mechanisms for biomineralization.

The first observation centers around the Vegetative Cells, or the “Photosynthetic Factory Workers”. While the cells are usually busy using solar energy to capture carbon dioxide the high-resolution microscopy captured what happens when these cells are under mechanical stress, such as when they are bent by other cells, or squashed against an existing mineral structure. The team were able to watch in real-time as this physical pressure caused the cells membrane to rupture. This breach of the membrane releases, or leaks, a key chemical, the sequestered inorganic carbon (bicarbonate) that the cell was holding inside. This rapid, localized surge of carbon creates excellent conditions for the formation of a new crystal at the leakage site. This reframes the start of the process. It is not just a passive gradual change in the environment that causes crystal growth, instead it can be caused by an active, stress-induced cell failure that is a trigger for calcite crystal nucleation.

The second observation concerns the actions of the Heterocyst Cells, or the “Nitrogen-Fixing Specialists”. Using the powerful techniques that enabled the researchers to peer into the inner workings of the cells the team were able to confirm that when a heterocyst cell came into direct contact with an existing calcite crystal “seed”, the crystal experienced rapid and dramatic growth. Crucially, this accelerated growth did not happen when a vegetative cell touched the crystal.

The team proposes that this dramatic crystal growth is connected to the function of Heterocyst Cell. Nitrogen fixation is a chemical transformation that consumes protons (H⁺). By pulling these protons out of the surrounding water, the heterocyst locally, and rapidly, increases the pH (alkalinity) of the microenvironment, which is amplified at the point of contact. This sudden shift in pH provides ideal conditions to effectively “glue” dissolved ions onto the existing crystal, resulting in rapid growth.

These findings describe how these two specialized cells have complementary roles. One is the nucleation trigger when stressed, and the other is the growth accelerator when in contact.

This detailed observation and analysis of the processes happening at the single-cell level shifts our understanding around the processes involved in biomineralization. Instead of thinking of microbial rock formation as a slow and uniform chemical reaction driven by large-scale phenomena like photosynthesis, this work illustrates mechanisms that are controlled and function-specific processes that are dictated by the precise cellular roles and localized behavior of individual cells.