Saturday, Dec. 9, 2017 • 1–4 p.m.
Peter Hamlington, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Christoph Keplinger, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Sehee Lee, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
This lecture will focus on promising renewable and sustainable energy technologies. Hamlington will discuss how turbulence impacts the future of wind energy in the United States and why turbulence, an inherently chaotic energy source, creates technical, financial and environmental challenges for wind farms. Keplinger will describe a new class of devices based on soft and variable capacitors, which are well suited to extract the energy present in ocean waves since they do not require costly and inefficient power take-off systems, and can tolerate harsh ocean environments where metal-based, electromagnetic generators struggle. Lee will describe developments in new lithium-ion battery electrode and electrolyte materials and other battery materials research in CU Boulder’s Electrochemical Energy Laboratory (ECEL) and its impact on environment and energy sustainability.
Peter Hamlington is an assistant professor and a Vogel faculty fellow in CU Boulder’s mechanical engineering department. Research in his group, the Turbulence and Energy System Laboratory, is focused on understanding and modeling turbulent flows in both engineering and geophysical problems using large eddy and direct numerical simulations. The primary emphasis in many of these studies has been to understand fundamental flow physics and to use the resulting insights for the development of physically accurate, computationally efficient models for large-scale simulations of real-world problems. Hamlington has a bachelor’s in physics from the University of Chicago and master’s and doctoral degrees in Aerospace Science from the University of Michigan.
Christoph Keplinger is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a fellow of the materials science and engineering program at CU Boulder. Prior to joining the CU Boulder faculty in 2015, he was a postdoc at Harvard University and he earned his doctoral degree in physics from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. Based on his background in soft matter physics, mechanics and chemistry, he now leads an interdisciplinary research group at Boulder, with a current focus on soft, muscle-mimetic actuators and sensors, sustainable energy generation and energy harvesting for biomedical applications, and functional polymers. His high-quality work has been published in top journals including Science, PNAS, Advanced Materials and Nature Chemistry, and by international awards such as the EAPromising European Researcher Award (2013), from the European Scientific Network for Artificial Muscles. For more information, visit Keplinger’s website.
Sehee Lee worked as a postdoctoral fellow, scientist, senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from 1997-2007 before joining the mechanical engineering department at CU Boulder in 2007. His research has concentrated on the investigation of the electrochemical and electro-optical properties of nanostructured materials as well as their micro-structural characteristics. He has published more 150 articles in refereed journals with an h-index of 44. He holds 10 U.S. patents and has eight U.S. patents pending. He has won several prestigious awards including the Mollenkopf Faculty Fellowship and the 2012 Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award, 2010 CO-LABS Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research, 2009 World Class University Professor, 2008 Outstanding Graduate Educator. He is an active member of the Electrochemical Society and Materials Research Society. Sehee Lee received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in materials science and engineering from Seoul National University in South Korea. For more information, visit Lee's website.
Fall 2017 Lectures
