UT Knoxville will host a mathematics colloquium with Dr. Sreekanth Pannala of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) at 3:35 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 26, in room 102 of the Haslam Business Building.
Pannala is a senior research staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at ORNL. The colloquium is entitled “Bridging Atomistic to Continuum Scales for Designing Energy Materials: Challenges and Opportunities.”
The challenging aspect of modeling energy materials — nuclear fuel, biomass, electrodes/electrolytes — is the wide range of both temporal and spatial scales encountered in the systems where these materials are produced, utilized or consumed. The challenge is to accurately account and bridge, as seamlessly as possible, the length and time scales involved in the problem. First, the problem is introduced using a biomass gasifier/pyrolyser, a nuclear fuel coater and a battery cell with sample results and provide an overview of the various models currently used at the different scales.
In particular, the critical role of the heterogeneous interfacial processes in the overall performance of these systems will be highlighted. The ongoing development of a multiphysics and multiscale mathematics framework for coupling various modeling methods over a range of scales will be presented. The development of a general wavelet-based multiscale methodology called compound wavelet matrix (CWM) for bridging spatial and temporal scales will be reported. Finally, the steps needed to generalize the current methodology for arbitrary systems dealing with energy materials or other applications involving multiscale/multiphysics coupling will be elucidated. The challenges and opportunities of employing these models for rapid deployment of clean energy solutions to the market place will be discussed.
This event is free and open to the public. For more info call 974-2463.