Ten centers across nine states will receive a share of $118 million in funding to advance fundamental energy research.
Argonne National Laboratory scientists will contribute to a new Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), which will be funded by the DOE Office of Science’s Basic Energy Sciences.
The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne. Credit: (Image by JJ Starr / Argonne National Laboratory.)
Ten new and some renewed centers will receive a share of $118 million in funding to advance fundamental energy research in advanced microelectronics, manufacturing science, quantum information science, and environmental management.
Among the new centers is APEX, which stands for “A Center for Power Electronics Materials and Manufacturing Exploration.” The DOE has selected its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to lead APEX, which will enable expanded materials selection and integration for next-generation power electronics. It will do so through a novel interface, substrate design, and pathways to scalable, low-cost, high-speed manufacturing electronics.
Awarded $13.9 million for four years, APEX joins 33 existing EFRCs funded by DOE. APEX is a collaboration between NREL, Argonne, Morgan State University, Johns Hopkins University, the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Virginia, and Kyma Technologies.
NREL’s Nancy Haegel, senior research advisor and APEX director, is eager for the center to conduct foundational research into the creation of materials. “APEX has a great team, composed of an interdisciplinary community of scientists driven by the greatest energy challenge of our time: the urgent need to innovate our way to a highly electrified, sustainable, and clean energy ecosystem.”
Argonne Physicist Jessica McChesney is a team member who works at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility. The APS is one of the world’s most powerful X-ray light sources, and the APEX team will use its capabilities to understand and design interfaces between the materials used in power electronics.
“The APS provides a wide array of X-ray techniques, including microscopy, spectroscopy, and diffraction,” said McChesney, who serves as a co-principal investigator for the characterization portion of APEX. “We want to understand the structure-function relationship of these materials both by themselves and in operational devices. Using the non-destructive power of X-ray beams, we can use spectroscopic techniques to understand the physics and chemistry of the materials. With microscopy and diffraction techniques, we can learn more about the spatial distribution of their atoms on both the macroscopic and atomic scales.”
With the APS undergoing significant upgrades to enhance its X-ray beam brightness by up to 500 times, APEX researchers can achieve more sensitive and detailed analyses of material structures and their evolution. This capability is essential for developing materials to support future energy grids, electrify transportation, and enable industrial decarbonization by handling increased thermal and power loads.
“Our materials focus will be borides, nitrides, carbides and oxides, which hold potential to enable the design of next-generation devices that are smaller and can handle more current,” said Haegel. “We need the materials, the devices, the manufacturing, and the larger system to evolve together to support the energy transformation. APEX will take a ‘codesign’ approach, which means we bring all these challenges together to inform our research from day one.”
