Bringing the E into STEM Education: My Joule Fellowship, Days 2 & 3

I didn’t have a chance to write yesterday.  It was one of those summer professional development days that I LOVE to have - we were busy all day and barely had time to breathe!  Here’s how my day broke down...

I started with a Lab Safety walk.  I know, I know, you’re thinking, “BORING!”  But, this walk was nothing like the typical safety talk.  We got to talk about some of the things we were really working with, and heard some cool stories about academic life.  Like what happens if you get a certain chemical on your hand, the only solution is to cut off your hand!  I thought that was pretty cool, but I am a little strange.  None of us will be working with anything that dangerous, but it sure beat the typical, “If you get something on you, here are the steps you go through...”  Nothing cures insomnia short of trying to read a safety manual!

Then, it was time to go to my lab.  I got there to find my professor was out at a faculty meeting until after lunch.  And I thought my faculty meetings were bad - at least I don’t have them in the summer!  So, I spent my time reading about the research and experimentation I would be doing.  I will be working with Dr. Park and his student (my Joule Buddy) on Battery Energy Storage Systems.  They are developing a new way to charge them so that they can more efficiently use the energy storage capacity of the new battery types, specifically Lithium-Ion batteries.  This is a really important project in many ways.  If you think about a typical battery, like in your car, they are huge and do not store enough energy for long enough periods of time to be effective.  Plus, if we are to use more green energy (solar or wind, for example), these are not constant sources.  Solar cells, for example, can only produce electricity when the sun is shining.  Can you imagine not being able to use the lights in your house at night?  So, these BESS’s can be used to store the extra electricity that green energy sources are creating when they are running (i.e. solar when the sun is shining and wind when it is blowing) and put it into the grid when the sources are not producing energy.  The Li-Ion battery has much more potential to store energy than other battery types, and is much lighter and takes up much less space than the typical batteries we’ve been using the past 150 years.  However, we still don’t use them to their full capacity due to the old charging methods that are used to charge them.  The research I am working on this summer as a Joule Fellow is developing a new way to charge them so that they can store more energy and charge quicker.

After spending hours trying to decipher scientific papers that were really beyond my comprehension level (for an analogy, try giving an first grader something written in Old English and asking them to read it), I met with Dr. Park.  He explained some of it so that it was more clear (but not perfectly).  I then went to a presentation on making movies.  I will be making a video based on my experience here.  I loved it - I was even able to help the presenter with finding some online tools to create videos so that, in the future, he can help his students (he is a MS Science teacher) and other Joule Fellows create better movies more effectively.

After my seminar, it was time to go home.  I was BEAT, but it was a good tired, the kind you get after having a really productive day, or exercising for a long time.  I remember feeling like that after a day at Space Academy and the Nuclear Energy Workshop in Idaho...

Today was not physically as busy, but it was just as draining.  It was more of a MENTAL draining, though.  I narrowed my research down to Li-Ion batteries and different ways to charge them.  I also spent quite a bit of time relearning my physics about batteries, as well as they theory behind how batteries work.  I swear, I got more information into my brain in the first half of this week than I have in the past six months!  Don’t tell my professors at Saint Joseph College (now the University of Saint Joseph...)!  Tomorrow, I get to learn about power conversion (batteries are Direct Current and the wall electricity is Alternating Current - you need to convert from AC to DC to charge batteries...) and continue my brain enhancement...

Until tomorrow...