Collaborative Seed Grants

As data centers are already consuming increasingly large shares of our energy supply, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) underscores urgent sustainability concerns. AI data centers can consume well over 100 megawatts — ten times more power than a typical data center for cloud storage — while power usage efficiencies have been stagnant for years.

Conventional networking with electrical hardware is poorly optimized for AI data centers, as energy is wasted by intermittently idling chips, while the physical proximity of the units within a high-performance computing cluster creates a hotspot that requires even more power to cool.

UW PIs Sajjad Moazeni and Ang Li, both assistant professors of electrical & computer engineering (ECE), will develop silicon-based photonic devices for fully optical networking. While Google has recently demonstrated 40% power savings in their AI clusters using optical switches based on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), the proposed “monolithic” silicon chip will offer a more versatile and scalable solution for enhancing AI data center sustainability and performance.

Transportation is responsible for 39% of Washington’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Strategically expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure (EVCI) is crucial to support the electrification of this sector, as existing research consistently demonstrates a strong correlation between public EVCI availability and EV ownership at both national and municipal levels.

However, reports have revealed that EVCI planning often neglects the specific needs and challenges of historically underserved communities, especially tribal communities, while electrifying both work fleets and personal vehicles in these communities may have the greatest potential for impact. For instance, tribe members often face particularly significant commutes — a survey of Yakama Nation tribal employees showed an average daily commute of 44 miles — while tribal government officers undertake even more extensive driving, with a typical forestry employee covering as much as 200 miles per day. Reducing fuel costs and mitigating air and noise pollution provides further sustainability and resilience benefits.

UW College of Built Environments faculty Lingzi Wu, Hyun Woo (Chris) Lee (construction management), and Dylan Stevenson (urban design + planning) will foster partnerships with the Northwest Tribal Technical Assistance Program Center (NW TTAP) and other interested tribes in Washington state to evaluate EVCI expansion needs and challenges, emphasizing environmental justice, transportation justice, and energy justice. The UW team will coordinate with tribal staff to tailor community engagement plans to each community’s needs, with the ultimate goal of co-creating a scalable, data-driven mapping tool to facilitate EVCI expansion in tribal areas.

The frequency, severity, and duration of extreme heat waves in the US have doubled in the last 50 years, with the summer of 2021 serving as a pertinent example for the Pacific Northwest. Demand for air conditioning rises much faster than power grid infrastructure can be updated, so grid operators try to shape customers’ consumption using algorithmic and market mechanisms that together are known as demand response (DR) programs. Co-PIs June Lukuyu and Baosen Zhang will study two important questions in designing DR programs to manage AC loads: the first is quantifying the amount of air conditioners that are actually available to control; and the second is balancing system-level objectives with equity and fairness concerns. They will conduct a study using five years of authentic data from Clark County’s Public Utility District and longitudinal survey data from the American Housing Survey, using the 2021 heat wave as a “natural experiment” in climate-impacted demand for air conditioning.

End-of-life processing and recycling of materials and components is critical to mitigating environmental contamination as well as U.S. dependence on foreign sources of materials for energy infrastructure. This joint UW-PNNL project, led by Professor Lilo D. Pozzo and Dr. Elias Nakouzi, will focus on developing a particular separation process for clean energy components: reaction-diffusion-advection (RDA). The team, which also includes CEI faculty David Bergsman, Matt Golder, and Zach Sherman, will collaborate across disciplines in analyzing materials and transport phenomena, modeling crystallization and growth at multiple scales, developing membranes, and scaling up technologies. The effort will be augmented with existing PNNL funding on autonomous experimentation for materials discovery. The long-term goal is to integrate more dynamic separation processes to broaden the sustainable recovery of critical materials. Focus areas include mineral recovery from wastewater, mineral extraction from water byproducts of fossil fuel extraction, lithium mining from geothermal brines, and AI/Robotics-accelerated development of sustainable manufacturing practices.

Quantum computers have the potential to play a key role in achieving a clean energy future. For example, quantum computing could fast-track the development of new materials and processes for ultra-efficient energy production and storage. However, building a useful quantum computer is extremely difficult — it is not even currently clear which materials are best for creating quantum bits (qubits). To address this grand challenge, project co-PIs Matthew Yankowitz, Xiaodong Xu, Di Xiao, and Ting Cao propose an entirely new approach towards building topological qubits based upon atomically-thin “van der Waals” materials. Xu, Xiao, and Cao recently discovered rare quantum properties in stacked, slightly misaligned two-dimensional sheets of the semiconductor molybdenum ditelluride. These materials can be coupled with vdW superconductors to create unique particles with fractional electronic charges, known as parafermions, which if harnessed could be the backbone of a device for storing and processing quantum information.

PI Cody Schlenker (chemistry) and co-PIs Lilo Pozzo (chemical engineering, MSE), Matthew Golder (chemistry), Munira Khalil (chemistry), Sotiris Xantheas (chemistry via PNNL), and Xiaosong Li (chemistry) will integrate computational chemistry, machine learning, spectroscopy, automated chemical synthesis, and high-throughput screening to develop new molecules for near-infrared (NIR) photon upconversion in next-generation solar photovoltaics. This “fusing” of solar NIR light into visible light that can be harvested by today’s PV modules could boost power conversion efficiencies by more than 10%; analysts suggest that if upconversion can be achieved at 1% of PV module cost, it could revolutionize the $100 billion global solar market.

The team also plans to interface with community and tribal colleges, developing Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) in Chemistry, Engineering, and Robotics.

While lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are ubiquitous in modern consumer electronics and electric vehicles thanks to their high energy density and well-understood chemistry, their reliance on scarce lithium metal and flammable organic electrolytes means that alternative designs may find a foothold in applications like long-term, grid-scale storage or wearable electronics. Aqueous zinc-ion batteries (ZIBs) are a particularly attractive alternative thanks to low-cost, non‐toxic, simple, and mature processing, but their development has been limited by the lack of high-performance cathodes and fundamental understanding of the more complex ion-storage chemistry.

Samson A. Jenekhe (chemical engineering, chemistry) and Guozhong Cao (MSE) aim to demonstrate an “inverted” ZIB that uses zinc metal as the cathode instead of the anode, which they believe may minimize or eliminate operational deficiencies related to conventional ZIB electrochemistry. The PIs will explore various novel materials as possible anodes, including a semiconducting organic polymer, a layered vanadium oxide, and complex oxides that contain at least five different transition metals. The data generated under the seed grant will enable the formulation of major hypotheses to drive external grant proposals.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced billions of dollars in funding for Hydrogen Hubs via the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which emphasized hydrogen as a critical part in the comprehensive energy portfolio of the United States.

Xiaodong Xu (physics) and Jihui Yang (MSE) will study the possible use of two-dimensional semiconductors as an efficient alternative to precious metals in electrocatalysts for hydrogen fuel cells. The PIs have previously demonstrated the ability to layer these atomically-thin materials with a relative twist, resulting in the formation of a “Moiré superlattice” across the layers with highly tunable electronic properties. The PIs have also developed spectroscopic techniques to analyze the performance of the Moiré superlattice materials in the hydrogen evolution reaction.