“Georgia Tech has a long-standing reputation for excellence in materials science and engineering,” said Materials Science and Engineering School Chair Dr. Naresh Thadhani. “Dr. Liu’s ARPA-E project presents an exciting opportunity for our program to have an even broader impact in solving challenges of great societal importance.”

Fuel cells convert the chemical energy of a fuel source into electrical energy and are optimal for distributed power generation systems, which generate power close to where it is used. Though fuel cells have been viewed as a potential eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuels, durability, performance, and cost have been barriers to widespread commercial use of fuel cells. Over the last decade, research advances have improved many of the materials and engineering challenges contributing to fuel cells’ cost and performance issues. But these research efforts have been primarily focused on exploring technologies that either operate at high temperatures (600^°C or higher) for grid-scale applications or low temperatures (180^°C) for vehicle technologies.

Liu’s project will focus on developing fuel cell devices that operate in an intermediate temperature range (200-500°C). The fuel cells will directly process methane and will use nanocomposite electrolytes that enable the fuel cells to operate at lower temperatures and utilize lower-cost materials to produce, store, and distribute power. Designed for household application, the fuel cells offer a viable low-cost, high-performance solution for mass distributed power generation and storage.

 “Methane fuel cells are particularly well-suited for household use because homes are already equipped to run on natural gas,” said Liu. “The fuel cell would just replace the water heater or furnace and enable families to power their homes without connecting to the grid, which offers a cleaner, more efficient energy option.”

Tim Lieuwen, director of the Strategic Energy Institute, said distributed power generation solutions such as Liu’s offer great promise in mitigating many of the challenges associated centralized generation.

“In our current centralized approach, electricity is primarily produced at large generation facilities and often require long transmission distances that can result in power losses and leave lines vulnerable to disruption during inclement weather or natural disasters,” said Lieuwen.

Liu is also a collaborator on another ARPA-E fuel cell project with The University of California – Los Angeles.

 “The overall goal of our EFRC is to provide a fundamental understanding of acid gas interactions with a broad class of materials and establish strategies for extending material stability and lifetime,” Walton said. “These results will ultimately enable us to accelerate materials discovery for large-scale energy applications.

Five other ChBE professors — Christopher Jones, Michael Filler, Ryan Lively, Sankar Nair and David Sholl, and Thomas Orlando, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry — also will serve as principal investigators at the center. The center will involve work at six partner institutions: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tenn.; the Department of Energy’s largest multiprogram science and energy laboratory), the University of Florida, the University of Alabama, the University of Wisconsin, Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pa.) and Washington University in St. Louis.

 “Our multifaceted approach to this important problem is unique, and one of our proposal reviewers even pointed out that this will be the first research center in the world specifically dedicated to this topic, said Walton.”

 The research center’s start date is Aug. 1. The awards announced on June 18 are the second round of funding for EFRCs. The 32 projects receiving funding were competitively selected from more than 200 proposals. 

For more information about the EFRC program, click here.

“The process is based on passive haptic learning (PHL),” said Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor and wearable computer pioneer. “We’ve learned that people can acquire motor skills through vibrations without devoting active attention to their hands.”

In their new study, Starner and Ph.D. student Caitlyn Seim examined how well these gloves work to teach Braille. Each study participant wore a pair of gloves with tiny vibrating motors stitched into the knuckles. The motors vibrated in a sequence that corresponded with the typing pattern of a pre-determined phrase in Braille. Audio cues let the users know the Braille letters produced by typing that sequence. Afterwards, everyone tried to type the phrase one time, without the cues or vibrations, on a keyboard.

The sequences were then repeated during a distraction task. Participants played a game for 30 minutes and were told to ignore the gloves. Half of the participants felt repeated vibrations and heard the cues; the others only heard the audio cues. When the game was over, participants tried to type the phrase without wearing the gloves. 

“Those in the control group did about the same on their second attempt (as they did in their pre-study baseline test),” said Starner. “But participants who felt the vibrations during the game were a third more accurate.  Some were even perfect.”

The researchers expected to see a wide disparity between the two groups based on their successful results while using the piano glove. But they were surprised the passive learners picked up an additional skill.

“Remarkably, we found that people could transfer knowledge learned from typing Braille to reading Braille,” said Seim. “After the typing test, passive learners were able to read and recognize more than 70 percent of the phrase’s letters.”

No one in the study had previously typed on a Braille keyboard or knew the language. The study also didn’t include screens or visual feedback, so participants never saw what they typed. They had no indication of their accuracy throughout the study.

“The only learning they received was guided by the haptic interface,” said Seim.

Seim is currently in the middle of a second study that uses PHL to teach the full Braille alphabet during four sessions. Of the eight participants so far, 75 percent of those receiving PHL reached perfect typing performance.  None of the control group had zero typing errors. PHL participants have also been able to recognize and read more than 90 percent of all the letters in the alphabet after only four hours.

Nearly 40 million people worldwide are blind. However, because Braille instruction is widely neglected in schools, only 10 percent of those who are blind  learn the language. Braille is also difficult to learn later in life, when diabetics, wounded veterans or older people are prone to lose their sight.

The Braille studies will be presented in Seattle this September at the 18th International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC).

In addition to teaching the piano, the researchers have previously demonstrated that the glove can improve sensation and mobility for people with spinal cord injury. 

This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant 1217473. Any conclusions expressed are those of the principal investigator and may not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.