The School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech will lead a multi-institution research center that will be financed with a four-year $11.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Center for Understanding and Control of Acid Gas-Induced Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME) is one of only 10 new Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) to be funded through the federal program and is the first EFRC to be led by Georgia Tech.

Krista Walton, a ChBE professor, will be the director for the center, which will advance the understanding of how acid gases interact with energy-related materials.

Five other ChBE professors — Christopher Jones, Michael Filler, Ryan Lively, Sankar Nair and David Sholl — and Thomas Orlando, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, also will serve as principal investigators at the center. The center will involve work at six partner institutions: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tenn.; the Department of Energy’s largest multiprogram science and energy laboratory), the University of Florida, the University of Alabama, the University of Wisconsin, Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pa.) and Washington University in St. Louis.

“The overall goal of our EFRC is to provide a fundamental understanding of acid gas interactions with a broad class of materials and establish strategies for extending material stability and lifetime,” Walton said. “These results will ultimately enable us to accelerate materials discovery for large-scale energy applications.

“Our multifaceted approach to this important problem is unique, and one of our proposal reviewers even pointed out that this will be the first research center in the world specifically dedicated to this topic.”

The research center’s start date is Aug. 1.

The awards announced on June 18 are the second round of funding for EFRCs. The 32 projects receiving funding were competitively selected from more than 200 proposals.

For more information about the EFRC program, click here.