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High Power and High Energy Systems at Small Scales
==Carol Livermore, Ph.D.== ===October 7, 2010=== High Power and High Energy Systems at Small Scales Small scale systems offer promising opportunities for power and energy applications. At one extreme, nanostructured materials such as carbon nanotube springs enable high power density and high energy density power sources. At the MEMS scale, micro chemical reactors enable compact, chip-scale chemical laser technology. At the small end of the macro scale, self-tuning energy harvesters enable efficient mechanical energy harvesting over a wide range of ambient frequencies. This talk will present recent research in these areas from the Micropower and Nanoengineering Laboratory at MIT. At the nanoscale, the talk will address the storage of elastic energy in carbon nanotube springs, and initial demonstrations of their use to drive real loads. Larger-scale systems will be addressed as well, including MEMS-scale high power chemical reactors that provide thrust, pumping, or power for chemical lasers and self-tuning energy harvesters for harvesting energy from rotational motion. Bio: Carol Livermore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. She received the B.S. degree in physics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1993 and the A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Harvard University, Cambridge, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2002, she was first a Postdoctoral Associate and then a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. Her research focuses on power MEMS (including electric generators, energy storage in nanomaterials, and MEMS components for high power lasers) and on techniques and applications for assembly in micro and nanoscale systems.
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