Workshop on a "Drug Discovery" Approach to Breakthroughs in Batteries. To be Held September 8-9, 2008 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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AbstractProposal Number: ECS-0841532Proposal Title: Workshop on a "Drug Discovery" Approach to Breakthroughs in Batteries to be held at MIT on September 8-9, 2008PI Name: Delgass, W. NicholasPI Institution: Purdue University Objectives: At a recent IEEE workshop for Congressional staff on plug-in hybrid cars, the questions were posed: "What is the probability that basic researchers in the US could come up with a new battery twice as good for cars as the newly emerging standard, the iron phosphate lithium ion battery? What could be done to maximize the probability that this goal is actually achieved, as soon as possible?" This workshop will attempt to answer the second question, with reference to what NSF can do. As part of its discussions, it will ask what can be done to take full advantage of approaches to creating breakthroughs used in the pharmaceutical industry, where computer simulation based on computational intelligence and quantum mechanical modeling has made it possible to search a larger space of possibilities more quickly and more cheaply than conventional approaches. Scientific merit of proposal: The search for better pharmaceuticals has demonstrated how a challenging testbed pursued in a serious manner can be of great value in stretching the underlying disciplines, and in building new bridges between disciplines. The chairman of this workshop intends to build on that prior success, to create a new scientific success story here. Input from the NSF communities in Adaptive and Intelligent Systems, and in Quantum Modeling, will also enhance the chances of success. A breakthrough in batteries of this magnitude would be highly transformative. Broad impact of proposal: The decision to fund this workshop at the present time is mainly based on its broader impacts. The issue of gasoline dependency and prices has already become a matter of life and death, and is expected to become a worse and worse threat to us all until and unless plug-in hybrid cars and electric cars penetrate half the world automotive fleet. That rate of penetration -particularly in US car production -is being substantially delayed by lack of good enough, cheap enough batteries available to US manufacturers. It is hoped that this workshop will enable the research community to contribute the most that it can to meeting this national need and grand challenge.