Session F54: Materials for Sustainable Development

Teaching Sustainability in Materials Science and Engineering (and Beyond).

Since 2008 we have been teaching various aspects of sustainability to undergraduate students at Iowa State University. In our first courses we introduced the ideas of sustainability in the context of global development. These courses were taught mostly to engineering students and took primarily a technical view of sustainability, both in the class room and on the ground in Africa. Since 2010, however, our focus has been on a course that presents a very broad view of sustainability to a highly diverse set of students from all parts of the University. This course presents interesting challenges owing to the breadth of the material and the rather large range of technical knowledge and skills (especially in mathematics) of the students. Our goals are to guide the students to a better understanding of the challenges of sustainability given the many constraints. Since there is a clear need for broadly creating a more informed view of sustainability, this course is the focus of today's talk. In it we will present our basic objectives for the course and our approach to covering the broad and disparate range of material. Having taught the course six (and a fraction) times, we will also comment on what we feel works well and what is still evolving.\\ \\In collaboration with K.M. Bryden, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University and A.Hallam, Department of Economics, Iowa State University   

Room temperature Creep and Elastic Anisotropy of LaCoO$_{\mathrm{3}}$ based perovskites

LaCoO$_{\mathrm{3}}$ is the parent compound of the La$_{\mathrm{1-x}}$Ca$_{\mathrm{x}}$CoO$_{\mathrm{3-\delta }}$ system that is a mixed electronic and oxide-ion conductor of technical interest for oxygen separation membranes, the cathode of solid oxide fuel cells, oxygen sensors, and catalysis. Its high-temperature properties, such as electronic-ionic conductivity, electrochemical performance, and catalytic activity, have been studied to a great extent, while the mechanical behavior of the lanthanum cobaltites is still not completely understood. LaCoO$_{\mathrm{3}}$-based ceramics do not demonstrate elastic deformation during loading, but rather exhibit ferroelastic behavior with non-linearity and hysteresis, which provides time, temperature and loading rate dependent deformation. The goal of this research was to investigate room temperature creep at different stresses in polycrystalline ferroelastic LaCoO3 based perovskites under compression. The attempt was made to identify the most important parameters which affect creep strain over different time periods. New phenomenological approach of ferroelastic creep was developed to describe mechanical behavior of cobaltites. Simple analytical expression was obtained to estimate equilibrium strain at given stress. Driving force of ferroelastic switching was defined for loading and unloading and the expression was proposed that allowed calculations of characteristic time for domain switching from driving force. The anisotropy of elastic behavior of the cobaltites was also studied.   

The Next Fifty Years: Electricity, Storage and Sustainability

Energy since the industrial revolution has been marked by historic transitions in sources, carriers and impacts, with each transition requiring a fifty-year time scale. Sustainability and clean energy, emergent themes with origins in the 1970s, are receiving increasing attention as climate change becomes more urgent. Transportation and the electricity grid, which account for nearly two thirds of carbon emissions, are ready for transitions to cleaner and more sustainable operation driven by electricity storage. The development of the lithium-ion battery and prospects for next generation beyond lithium-ion technology with the potential to electrify transportation and accelerate the deployment of renewable wind and solar will be discussed.\\ \\The energy storage frontier: lithium ion batteries and beyond, George Crabtree, Elizabeth Kocs, Lynn Trahey, MRS Bulletin 40, 1067 (2015) \\Energy, society and science: the next fifty years, George Crabtree, Elizabeth Kocs, Thomas Alaan, Futures 58, 53 (2014)