About the Energy Frontier Research Center

Established in 2014, the Center for Understanding and Control of Acid Gas-Induced Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME) was one of 10 new Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) financed with a four-year $11.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In 2018, the U.S. DOE renewed funding for UNCAGE-ME with an additional $12 million. And in 2022, the DOE renewed funding for UNCAGE-ME with an additional $13.2 million through 2026 and is a part of 42 other EFRCs focused on scientific breakthroughs. The focus of the UNCAGE-ME EFRC is to advance the understanding of how porous and electrochemical materials used for hydrogen production and carbon dioxide capture and conversion evolve and degrade when exposed to emerging contaminants.

Ryan Lively, full professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, is director for the Center. Five other GT ChBE professors — Christopher Jones, Krista Walton, Sankar Nair, Rampi Ramprasad, and David Sholl — serve as principal investigators. The center involves work at seven partner institutions: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tenn.; the Department of Energy’s largest multiprogram science and energy laboratory), Sandia National Laboratories, the University of Alabama, the University of California at Riverside, Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pa.), the University of Florida, and the University of Michigan.

Four-Year Research Goals:

  1. Elucidate the overarching relationships for process-induced structure and property evolution of functional materials with a focus on separations media and (electro)catalysts.

  2. Leverage and advance computational and machine learning techniques to enable fundamental molecular and electronic level predictions of materials interacting with complex mixtures of targeted gases and contaminants.

  3. Demonstrate accelerated materials discovery for clean energy technologies via process-materials coupled research.

Director

Ryan Lively

Professor

(404)-894-8795

Email

Managing Director

Sean Wood

Research Scientist II

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Mission Statement

To develop a deep knowledge base in the characterization, prediction,and control of materials evolution in the presence of realistic contaminants, processes, and mixtures to accelerate materials discovery for sustainable production and utilization of H2 and CO2.