This award supports travel of U.S. participants in the workshop "Poly and Polymer Electrolytes for Energy Conversion: Ab Initio, Molecular, and Continuum Models," held at the Lorenz Center within the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, 23-27 August 2010.
The goal of the workshop is to facilitate communication among the disparate groups of researchers applying ab initio, molecular, and continuum approaches to the modeling of nanostructured polymer electrolyte materials used in energy conversion and storage devices. The meeting features invited talks by leading researchers, as well as formal directed discussion sessions and a session of presentations contributed by junior participants.
The workshop brings together mathematicians, computational chemists, computational materials scientists, and experimentalists to facilitate research progress in areas that address the pressing need for a more efficient energy infrastructure to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Funding is directed to ensure broad participation by students, postdocs, junior faculty, and members of groups underrepresented in mathematics.
Conference web site: www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2010/404/info.php3?wsid=404
: Ab initio, Molecular, and Continuum models, held August 23-27, 2010. The workshop was co-hosted by the Lorentz Center at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Effecient energy conversion devices, such polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells, bulk heterojunction (BHJ) or dye-sensitized (Graetzel) solar cells, supercapacitors, and separators for lithium ion batteries require the fabrication of complex `selectively conducitive' membranes that conduct ions of one charge, but not of the opposite charge. A primary focus of the workshop was the development of interdisciplinary collaborations between mathematicians and computational chemists and materials scientists. The workshop featured 24 invited talks over a broad range of topics from the modeling of electronic structure and length-scales, to molecular dynamics approachs to ion-solvent interaction, to continuum models that incorporate novel formulations of solvation energy. There were also two tutorials, one on self-consistent mean field theory, and a second on renormalization group methods for the development of novel continuum equations from subscale models. A list of participants, including their affiliations, of talks, including abstracts, and well as an event report and an outline of the tutorials can be found at the conference web-site www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2010/40/info.php3?wsid=404
