Prof. Asegun S Henry

Novel energy system concepts that help to mitigate the effects of climate change, including solar energy, energy storage, and transportation. Concepts currently under development include thermal energy grid storage using multi-junction photovoltaics (TEGS-MPV), high temperature concentrated solar power (CSP) using liquid metals or molten salts, ceramic/refractory based fluid handling infrastructures, high temperature thermochemical energy conversion and reactor design, methane pyrolysis for hydrogen production, solar fuels, direct contact heat exchangers; Atomistic level modeling to study the fundamental physics of phonon transport in ordered materials, disordered materials, molecules and at interfaces; Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, supercell lattice dynamics calculations, first principles calculations, density functional theory (DFT), interatomic potentials optimized for describing phonons directly from first principles, Taylor expansion based potentials and neural network potentials.