This story has been updated.

By James T. Hammond
jhammond@scbiznews.com
Published April 29, 2009

A fuel cell scientist recruited to the University of South Carolina through the lottery-funded endowed chairs program, along with his research team, has won a competitive grant worth $12.5 million to conduct energy-related nanotechnology research.

It is the largest single research grant ever for the USC College of Engineering and Computing and one of the largest in the history of the university, Dean Michael Amiridis said in an e-mail to the college faculty.

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The U.S. Department of Energy plans to fund a new Energy Frontier Research Center at USC with $12.5 million, but the agency cautioned that the award budgets are preliminary.

Amiridis said the plan calls for the USC research team to receive $2.5 million a year for five years.

“Please join me in congratulating professor Kenneth Reifsnider and his team (Professors Frank Chen, Chris Xue Andreas Heyden and Hanno zur Loye) for their success in the recent Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Centers competition,” Amiridis said in the letter.

Reifsnider, director of USC’s Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Program, was recruited from the University of Connecticut, where he led a fuel cell research center that was also supported by the defense contractor United Technologies.

The grant was included in a White House announcement that the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science will spend $777 million on 46 new multimillion-dollar Energy Frontier Research Centers over the next five years. The centers will be established at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and private firms across the nation, the White House said.

The new Materials for Energy Systems research center at USC will seek to “build a scientific basis for bridging the gap between making nano-structured materials and understanding how they function in a variety of energy applications,” according to the Department of Energy announcement.

Reifsnider put it simply: The research is about how to use energy, how to store it and how to carry it. Scientists will try to make particles that are very different work together on the nanoscale to improve the efficiency, safety and portability of fuels.

The endgame, Reifsnider said, is “how do we use energy? It’s all around us. It blows our hat off. It gives us a sunburn. There might be a way, for example, to use coal without polluting the atmosphere.”

The USC team’s research could yield discoveries in fields such as electrochemistry, fuel synthesis, chemical refinement, hydrogen storage, and heat storage.

Reifsnider noted that the energy challenge grants have been in the works for five years, and his team’s proposal has been in various stages of development for about a year. The 2-inch-thick, 1,000-page proposal was drafted over 3 1/2 months, he said.

This USC-based research center includes planned collaborations with scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Utah, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of Connecticut, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Savannah River National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.