EFRC 10@10: Developing the Next Generation of Scientific Talent: Michael Naguib

Program Document · Mon Jul 29 04:00:00 EDT 2019

OSTI ID:1615638

Naguib, Michael ^[1]

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1. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport Center (FIRST)

This is a biography of Michael Naguib, winner of the Workforce Development Award at the EFRC 10@10 Awards Ceremony in 2019. Michael Naguib was born in Egypt and completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Cairo University. He wanted to study advanced materials, but there was no place to do so in Egypt. Instead he enrolled in a PhD program at Drexel University in Philadelphia. There he was assigned to explore whether certain materials that have a layered structure (with three layers, each having a different chemical composition) could be used to make better electrodes for lithium ion batteries. Michael found that the materials were not useful as electrodes because lithium ions (the charge carriers in modern batteries) could not penetrate the material. To address this, he tried to modify the material by removing the middle layer with acid. The unexpected result was the discovery of a completely new nano-material: a titanium-carbon compound in the form of a two-dimensional sheet less than a nanometer thick. He and his advisors at Drexel immediately recognized the new material’s potential for energy storage. Publication of that discovery—of what soon became clear was a whole family of two-dimensional materials now called MXenes—triggered a world-wide surge of research. To explore MXenes and related phenomena in more detail, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science funded an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) on Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport. The research team included computational modelers, university experts in materials synthesis and thermodynamic analysis, and scientists at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) who could probe the material’s structure with neutrons and powerful microscopes.

• Research Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC) (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) (SC-22)
• OSTI ID: 1615638
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

25 ENERGY STORAGE
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS