Metal Fuels for Zero-Carbon Heat and Power

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In order to mitigate climate change and provide secure energy supplies in a future of limited fossil-fuel production, society must transition to a low-carbon economy. Clean primary electricity generation, from solar, wind, hydroelectric, or other sources, is technologically proven and increasingly cost competitive with fossil-fuelled systems. Much more challenging is the development of technologies to store this clean primary energy at high energy densities for long-term backup and long-distance renewable-energy trade, or to fuel heavy-duty vehicles and machinery, including long-distance trucks and ships. My group is researching all possible alternative fuel options to address this urgent need. The present Discovery Grant (DG) proposal builds off of our expertise in biofuel combustion and pollutant-emission properties, as well as novel combustion technologies, developed through the past DG, and focuses on our exciting and novel concept of burning metal fuels, with either air or water, as zero-carbon energy carriers. Metal fuels provide extremely high energy and power densities with potentially zero pollutant emission and I am leading a worldwide effort to promote metal fuels as a technically and economically superior concept to either batteries or the widely explored hydrogen economy. We recently published a ground-breaking paper on metals as recyclable fuels, which received significant international media attention and is now driving forward a new international research effort on metal fuels. In the last 5 years, we have pushed forward our understanding of flames in metal-fuel suspensions further than any other research group in the world. The research in this DG will build off of this strong foundation to tackle fundamental and applied research questions related to metal combustion, in general, and the use of metals as zero-carbon recyclable fuels. We are also leading the research effort to use high-temperature metal-water reactions/combustion as a novel method to produce hot hydrogen for a variety of power applications. Within this DG, we will push these experiments to supercritical water conditions where exceptional hydrogen-production rates and yields are expected. I believe that metal fuels will be an essential part of our low-carbon future and the research proposed in this DG can help us transition to a low-carbon economy, with major positive impacts on our global economy and the environment. My research program is enabled by, and provides significant and unique training opportunities for, the great team of HQP that I have the privilege of supervising. These HQP will work from fundamental science to developing prototypes for commercialization, such that their experience will span from theory to practice. These HQP will gain the technical, and oral and written communication, skills that will enable their success in whatever career they pursue after graduation.