Next-Gen Battery Technology: The Role of Leadership in Scientific Breakthroughs at West Point with Dr. Enoch Nagelli

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I'm thrilled to have Dr. Enoch Nagelli here from the Department of Chemistry and Life Science to talk to us about building renewable energy. Let me tell you about Enoch. Dr. Enoch Nagelli is an Associate Professor and the Program Director of Chemical Engineering in the Department of Chemistry and Life Science.

ersity in Cleveland, Ohio. In: 2014

He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and an officer in their Environment Division. He is also a member of the American Chemical Society and the Electrochemical Society. Dr. Nighelli currently serves as a member of the Chemical Engineering Program ABET Accreditation Board, Assistant Officer in Charge for the Cadet American Institute of Chemical Engineers Club, Chemical Engineering Department Academic Counselor, and Assistant Officer Representative for the United States Military Academy Men's Basketball Team.

Woo! Alright, first, Enoch, I have to say I love how you dove head-first into the whole West Point experience. Thanks for all you do to develop cadets in and out of the classroom. I'm going to ask you a tricky question out of the gate. What is your favorite part of the West Point experience?

I want to start [: 00:02:00

Yeah, and so what would you call that teaching through research? Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk specifically about your research. And again, I want to... I want to highlight how much the research that you're doing is connected to the education of the cadets and in the classroom. I think that's what makes it so exciting but talk to me about what inspired you to conduct this battery research that you're working on.

ter or more, even more, more [: 00:03:00

You have to innovate the materials that make up those devices. So that was the exposure I got. And I think the energy side of things came in when I still remember I was a graduate student in grad school where I went to India to attend a family wedding, a family friend's wedding.

's still a lot of the energy [: 00:04:00

Coal, fossil fuels, and renewables are one aspect.

So then I started digging a bit more that same year when I returned from India, Hurricane Sandy hit. And that devastated the East Coast and impacted the grid and power reliability. So, going two weeks without power in areas of need connected a little bit more to me about the importance of looking into how we can take the tremendous reliable grid we have where the utility operators are providing that energy whenever on demand, how can we augment it to have either backup power or ability to peak shave or To meet the demands when needs and is very high essentially, maybe the grid operators can use alternative technologies to peak shave.

When you say peak shave, what does that mean?

So essentially, [: 00:05:00

One way to shave that demand or that peak and surge is to augment or distribute renewable energy infrastructure to help you support that demand. So you're not trying to meet that surge in demand by yourself by adding more fossil fuels. You can use other alternative technologies to help you balance that.

I guess that gets into the battery technology because, if I think about it, the benefit of fossil fuels is you can respond to energy demands immediately, whereas with renewables, there is, your restraints are wind or solar or hydro, whatever it might be, and it gets into a storage question. Am I right?

That's exactly right

so, and [: 00:06:00

That's where either you're not meeting the demand at the time with the grid infrastructure you have, or is there a way you can use the natural resources around you like solar and wind?

Can you store that with batteries? And store it with the intermittency of wind and solar. And if you have a solar farm, you, when you have light, can have your batteries to store that power. And then, at night, you can discharge that battery to provide reliable power to the grid.

nto a reliable grid. And so. [: 00:07:00

What, I think that's one of the resources that we, our grid, can use. The dominant resources are still coal and natural gas. And I think nuclear power is still part of the equation. The infrastructure and the support and safety of nuclear, just like any other dispatchable power source, is critical.

And I think it's close to 18 to 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear, which has been changing a lot. But I believe that technology is there. And I think we need to be ready to use whatever we need to meet the demands of the grid.

But do you, do you see renewables playing a bigger and bigger part?

Yes

assuming you can get the battery problem solved.

I completely agree. We're all looking at you to get the battery problem solved. I'll be in the lab.

s Like, what is the problem? [: 00:08:00

So, you have two different types and categories. You have stationary power—so stationary batteries, which are large-scale batteries for enormous power demands. If you want to store a lot of energy, you need more extensive infrastructure. So, stationary power works that way. And then there's mobile energy, which is similar to the lithium-ion that's in our laptops.

things, the flow battery, is [: 00:09:00

So, what's the flow battery?

So, imagine the components of a regular battery. You have two electrodes and a membrane or a separator between the two electrodes.

And then you have usually a liquid or a paste that's an electrolyte, and electrolytes have ions and species that can transfer electrons to the electrodes. So essentially, that's how we power something or provide electricity. The idea behind a flow battery is taking that same approach, but imagine the liquid electrolyte being in tanks.

In tanks that are scalable. So, if you want more energy density, you have... essentially more energy to store. So, the power can scale the same way. So, to meet the power demands of an extensive solar or wind infrastructure, you want to store a lot more.

arger, but then you can also [: 00:10:00

Are you working on flow batteries? Yes, so how is your research working towards making the flow battery that you described these big scalable flow batteries possible? And where's the hang-up?

Like, why can't we do it? What would be an example?

So, the rare earth metals that cost as high as vanadium have been the most commercialized flow battery system that exists everywhere.

I think vanadium resources are precious, metals that are not abundant. We don't have a lot of it, and now we have to start innovating at that periodic table level where you look at different elements and use their properties that are more earth abundant, that are safer, that you want a reliable grid with.

a contract with Fort Carson [: 00:11:00

So the first flow battery farm is at, is being built at Fort Carson right now?

And for installation energy security and storage. Because if you're in a geographical area where you have a lot of sun. You have the solar cells or solar farm you need to be able to store a lot of that if you're not, if you're dumping electricity that you're not using from the solar cells, it just makes sense to integrate batteries or energy storage into it, so that's a technology that, you know, the Army is looking at and it's going to be built at Fort Carson and it's very exciting and that's where we come in and we're doing a lot of the fundamentals with my collaborators at Case Western looking at, building flow batteries, but small scale like benchtops here, looking at the chemistries, looking at the performance diagnostics.

What's happening inside the [: 00:12:00

How does this all connect to your work with nanomaterials?

So it's a little bit different because even though they're connected I would say big batteries and flow batteries still require the same materials. It's still the same chemistry. Nanomaterials were you know, ever since, we have the ability to isolate and synthesize these materials, we can now figure out a way to engineer them into three dimensional space. So those nanomaterials are still...

The same.

What makes something a nanomaterial? Like, what, is there a, is there some sort of size?

So the Nobel Prize in: 2010

One of the questions, is taking... What the Nobel Prize experiment was taking a [00:13:00] basically a flake of graphite Which we all can relate to things you can find everywhere Whether it's your pencil lead that has some form of graphite in you take graphite and what happened was they Materials they ended up starting by breaking down those big sheets of graphite by using scotch tape pressing scotch tape on top of graphite, peeling off the scotch tape, and essentially you would see a layer of graphite or chunks of graphite that transferred to the scotch tape.

And then you would take that same piece of scotch tape, fold it in half, and open it up again. And so you're continuously breaking down the crystallite sizes, or the size of the crystals that are graphite based, that are all carbon. into smaller dimensions. And that's a way you can look at it.

r graphene, but graphene was [: 00:14:00

Can you gimme an example what you mean by like engineering them into a three-dimensional space?

We can make them now, but how do we use them into devices?

my effort when I got here in: 2016

The solution looks like it's just water. You have a low concentration, and the thing is like, you want to take those materials, you want to tune the surface chemistry, or engineer the chemistry to be able to connect them into three dimensions, because... You have nanomaterial that's a single sheet of carbon, it's not even, you know, it's a few nanometers thick, but it's a couple microns in terms of width and dimensions.

cadets win the Nobel Prize? [: 00:15:00

Um,

No, well, I don't know about that, sir.

m putting a mark on the wall,: 2024

So, The science fiction, the hopeful, like, this is what we're hoping to see in the future with nanomaterials and what that's going to open for us.

So, right now, we have processors that power everything, or that essentially provide information.

Like your computer, your watch, your phone has processors and those processors have microchips and those microchips are made up of things that are billions of transistors that help you transfer current and information. But you want to get smaller and the dimensions that which the processors are working in, you can't really fit a lot of other things at the large scale.

h is essentially a rolled up [: 00:16:00

And another space is I think to get lighter batteries. And to be able to have, without sacrificing performance and speed, you need to innovate at the electrode level and the electrode level. Right now, most of the electrodes people are surging in looking at carbon paste, which is just essentially like activated carbon or charcoal.

ing for mobile applications, [: 00:17:00

Or if your materials of a drone or, A vehicle or made up of some solar cell materials that can help you charge the battery. That's part of the body of the

vehicle. That's pretty revolutionary right there. This question, tell me exactly what the cadets are doing in this space and what's your day to day like working with the cadets?

ay in a lab would be, cadets [: 00:18:00

We have an economics major who's a first year right now on the team. So we've been working with making the materials into three dimensions. So if we can synthesize graphene, which we did, that was the first efforts in the lab, make it using a different technique instead of scotch tape, instead of a cadet standing over scotch tape and just peeling it back and forth, which I think would be pretty cool.

That was one of the first experiments my PhD advisor mentioned, Hey, you should try the scotch tape technique, which I didn't know that could probably take a long time and getting that. Getting that graphite to be a single layer, I realized right away, it was a, it was a teaching.

How do you know the graphite's in a single layer?

How do you know when you're done?

That's the thing. You can't see it. Yeah. And you have to do some characterization and using materials characterization or microscopy to look at where you can look at things at a nano dimension. Or class is over and you're like, that's good. Yes, .

You've hit the single layer. [: 00:19:00

So we've been working on a technique that you can chemically oxidize it. So. Imagine you start with graphite, but you're using strong acids to basically break apart those graphite layers. Between the graphite sheets, it's like a textbook that you have a bunch of pages. But imagine introducing things between pages, like bookmarks, and those bookmarks are what separates those sheets, and over time with energy, which we use like in high temperature, you can break apart those sheets in solution, but the toughest challenge with that textbook of opening it up with bookmarks, which are functional groups, is the textbooks like, like to close.

the first couple years as a [: 00:20:00

Whether it's in solution they're physically not restacking. To lose surface area to lose the properties.

How new is this? Like this is what you're discussing this nanotechnology Research that you're doing in a lab and you're doing with cadets and to anyone who's listening to this who's you know went to West Point You know 25 30 years ago.

I mean, this is a complete change in how we do things And so the first question is like how new is this ability to do research on nanotechnology? And then further, how do you see this complementing and supplementing cadet education to help them be critical thinkers?

whether it's small iteration [: 00:21:00

And I think collectively that's what the academic space and the national lab space is looking at. But from a West Point perspective, we've, you know, looked at these materials since probably around 2016 when I got here. Integrating these carbon nanomaterials into a normal lab experiment and then studying their properties.

Cadets bringing that fresh look. They seek that understanding even to connect the classroom fundamentals to the lab. And I think one of the ways we work together on this is figuring out what problems to solve.

And I think that's where it's a challenging space where your boundary conditions open up completely. Like it's, you can come up with a local solution, but you have to think about the next problem. Because it's not really solving the bigger picture, it's a small solution to a bigger problem.

at translates very well into [: 00:22:00

And try to figure out solutions to those issues. How do you see the technology or the work that you're doing in the lab translating and being applied in some practical or operational way?

Oh, it's, that's one of the reasons why I, you know, coming here. The end user is not just the scientific innovation, but also is how can it support the Army.

And that's where working with collaborators at Picatinny Arsenal, part of the DEVCOM Armament Center we're able to study, you know, and innovate these batteries that the cadets are working on. It serves a purpose because they might be going into munitions. And looking at materials, maybe, Could be one way that we can solve the bigger picture.

it's for munitions, for geo [: 00:23:00

Because everything we do... is not only training the future generation of officers, they're going to be critical problem solvers, but they're going to be able to understand the technology and the end user at the same time. To be able to come up with the, a new battery or new capacitor that could work will be even more meaningful for the cadets before they commission.

Maybe it's tested in one single rail gun or maybe it's tested in a air gun, but at least we know that there's an end user in mind, Not only does it support the army, but overall you're advancing the ball in nanomaterials and the options of the technology going forward.

Can you talk specifically about the connection to, you mentioned that you're doing work on munitions, like what exactly are you doing with munitions?

ries and thermal capacitors. [: 00:24:00

It all started with the multidisciplinary team in CLS with civilian universities and junior officers were a big part of it. Major Casper Yee and Major Jeff Chin, who were first time rotators, taught at West Point, they're both grads, they're both chemical engineers, and they worked on research for three years while they're here in that nanomaterial space. And what we're able to do is, like, figure out a way to take graphene together with other nanomaterials. How do we make it into a three dimensional film?

And one of the collaborative [: 00:25:00

You can't really do anything with pixie dust. I mean, it sounds great. But putting them back into solution, you want to be able to make films or make electrodes. So one way that Major Yee and the team of cadets that worked on it for probably a year and a half now, And to be able to electrospray these materials onto a electrode.

battery. And that's the kind [: 00:26:00

Let me ask you one more technical question. How long until you would think we'd have the battery technology to be able to harness the energy that comes from renewables to be able to supplement the surges that we talked about in the grid?

ave been around for a while, [: 00:27:00

And my research advisor, my post doc research advisor Professor Robert Savinell, is one of those faculty who have invested in the all iron flow battery, which I did my postdoc with. There's the technologies there, and there are examples of grid level energy storage systems all around the world. The chemistries are different all around.

There's startup space and companies that are looking at different chemistries. Like Lockheed Martin Energy has their own chemistry. We've got other commercialized technologies like using vanadium ion, which is the most conventional flow battery technology. But there's a lot of different options that I think the advancement in the renewable energy space for flow battery installation energy security is, it is as advanced a lot.

ven a forward operating base [: 00:28:00

So what inspired you to come to West Point?

as in Salt Lake City, Utah in: 2015

But it was, it just made sense for me to submit an application, especially because one thing I noticed that they required a teaching statement. And I remember thinking, going through the process where I was looking at other academic schools, the teaching statement was what I was told and mentored in the, at Case Western and throughout my time of people searching for faculty positions, focus on the research statement when you submit.

But I kind of spent time on both.

Our primary mission is to educate, train, inspire the Corps of Cadets. And teaching the cadets is the focus of the academic program. And it's a teaching institution. Yeah, I think you found that the research can complement it, but why did teaching attract you?

oing to see this in the real [: 00:30:00

You make an observation, you run more trials on it and then figure out how that data fits. And that's where I thought it would draw in more cadets where you have these courses that could, at times, could seem like isolated experiences, but I think doing multidisciplinary research can really connect all those classes to a application or to a greater picture.

that you do when you are in [: 00:31:00

Looking back in being back in general chemistry teaching plebs or freshmen general chemistry really in everything, everything we do in the lab goes back to fundamentals. So a freshman in college, can come and start research right away with the exposure to the fundamentals in the classroom.

But I think anything we're doing in the lab, anything in our group, we're doing it with the fundamentals in mind. I thought that's what makes it translatable where you can connect every single experiment to making observations after an experiment's done, but then you can always go back to the periodic table, and What you observed in your general chemistry course.

dig in, and then solve more [: 00:32:00

So, we're going to come back to the periodic table, because I know you love this, right?

So you clearly have a immense passion for research. Why?

Wow. I was really motivated by my family and I think a big part of it is like, what else is there if we're not truly working on the next problem?

And I think that's what really motivates me, whether it's in the classroom, how do we innovate in the classroom to come up with new problems, new design concepts for cadets to study. But also, that applies in research, and I think I'm, like, naturally drawn to that. It could be that I was probably taking things apart when I was a kid when I wasn't supposed to, probably but I think that kind of translated into this curiosity, and I think that's where the curiosity really connected with research connects with that curiosity that I have.

rch, what are you trying to, [: 00:33:00

I think it really develops their ability to adapt in a, regardless of climate and resources, adapt and really come up with local solutions on the fly. And to innovate when you have a lack of resources or a lack of technology. Because I think when you're investing in education now, your investment is in the individual.

And we work on developing character. And I think the proficiency to be able to solve problems is also a skill set that we have to be able to continually adapt and solve problems when maybe resources are limited. Maybe you're in an environment that really doesn't dictate the same problem solving that everyone else has been looking at.

ink this space that research [: 00:34:00

And I'm like... I think about it when you just what you've talked about here. It's iterative. Innovation is iterative. It's not you're going to solve it right out the gate. It requires a level of humbleness to recognize that maybe I don't know everything.

It also requires teamwork. You kept talking about the research team, and I like the fact on that focus on teamwork. And then I think what you're really getting at is just helping them to become critical thinkers, right? Being able to think broadly, think differently. And I love your point about you might not have a completely sanitized or a perfect place with all the resources you need.

You might have to adjust on the fly. So it creates a level of flexibility. And I think that's the benefit when you just described, I was, as you were saying, I'm like, yeah, that's pragmatically, I see so much about creating adaptive. Young officers who, the way they think. I also think there's a level of, you can't be risk adverse when you do this.

Like, you have to [: 00:35:00

I always joke around about the dissertation time and dark times for a lot of us. And you only write a little bit about that one couple, or a couple things that worked. But then a lot of it is problem solving about things, why things didn't work.

hat just happens and there's [: 00:36:00

So you're essentially developing character at the same time because you're solving problems for things that haven't been done before.

You are clearly, completely inculcated in the West Point environment because you just said like when something goes wrong or a cadet's challenged or they fail, it's like, hey, it's building character.

Don't worry about it. That's the perfect line right there. Okay, I have some rapid fire questions. I don't know if I'm ready. We'll see. Alright, here you go. What's the most challenging course you teach?

So, I would probably say Chemical Engineering Laboratory, CH 459.

Do you have a pocket protector?

I need to get one, sir.

How many [: 00:37:00

Well, it's interesting you say that. We have science themed books for our son. Yeah. And whenever it's my time, my turn to read, I'd like to, in the beginning, especially when he was an infant, I brought out the Periodic Table.

You know he's not going to play in the NBA if you do that. What's the hardest class you ever took?

Ooh, chemical engineering, statistical thermodynamics in graduate school, sir.

That sounds terrible. That sounds absolutely terrible.

Stat mechanics was definitely a lot of character development.

Yeah, there's some character development, yeah.

You have 30 seconds to give a sales pitch to a future officer to major in chemical engineering. What is it?

to understand how processes [: 00:38:00

What you want to do is you want to work on Innovating using math and combining math and science to be able to solve processes that help you make things cheaper, maybe things more efficient, and also things more accessible.

Alright, so thanks for joining us Enoch. Be sure to tune in to the Inside West Point Ideas That Impact podcast next month.

Remember, you can find this podcast, as well as the other podcasts, journals, and books hosted or published by the West Point Press at westpointpress. com. Until next time.