Engineering Commons^™

The Effect Of Controlled Nanomaterial Deposition Towards Electrodes For Microbial Fuel Cells And Electrolysis Cells, Bryan Dennis Steinhoff

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) and microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) are relatively new energy harvesting technologies that utilize the bacteria in wastewater or other organic-rich aqueous media to produce either electricity or hydrogen gas, respectively. Given that MFCs and MECs are newer technologies, there has been many works over the past two decades that have provided understanding into how modifying electrode surface chemistry can improve these cells. It has been widely known that increasing the surface functional groups of MFC anodes, either chemically or thermally, causes the cell power density to increase dramatically. Since MFCs and MECs use the same anodes, …

Predicting The Mechanical Properties Of Nanocomposites Reinforced With 1-D, 2-D And 3-D Nanomaterials, Scott Edward Muller

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Materials with features at the nanoscale can provide unique mechanical properties and increased functionality when included as part of a nanocomposite. This dissertation utilizes computational methods at multiple scales, including molecular dynamics (MD) and density functional theory (DFT), and the coupled atomistic and discrete dislocation multiscale method (CADD), to predict the mechanical properties of nanocomposites possessing nanomaterials that are either 1-D (carbyne chains), 2-D (graphene sheets), or 3-D (Al/amorphous-Si core-shell nanorod).

The MD method is used to model Ni-graphene nanocomposites. The strength of a Ni-graphene nanocomposite is found to improve by increasing the gap between the graphene sheet and a …