January 24, 2025
By Chloe Arrington

Andrei Fedorov, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, Rae S. and Frank H. Neely Chair, and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, will represent Georgia Tech in a new international research initiative. The program, Adopting Sustainable Partnerships for Innovative Research Ecosystem (ASPIRE) for Top Scientists, is funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. It will receive approximately $3.2 million in funding over five years.

The award will support a broad spectrum of multidisciplinary research activities by the multinational teams and intermediate to long-term (three months to one year) collaborative visits to global research sites in Japan, Europe, and the U.S. A total of 46 proposals were submitted to ASPIRE for Top Scientists, out of which 14 were selected by expert evaluation. Each project is an international collaboration and the initiative's key focus is advancing science and technology on an international level.

Fedorov will lead a project titled "Construction of International Data and Analysis Platform for Inorganic Power-storage Materials Informatics with Nano/Micro-Structure" that will explore the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Informatics, and Energy. He will represent Georgia Tech as a principal investigator. The planned research will also involve faculty members and graduate students from College of Engineering schools involved in the Strategic Energy Institute.

The international team includes the Commission for Atomic and Alternative Energy (France), Georgia Tech (USA), Institute of Science Tokyo (Japan), Princeton University, University of California at Santa Barbara (USA), and University of Cambridge (UK)

According to Fedorov, teams will work on a wide range of topics at the junction of big data, AI, and novel micro/nano-structured materials and processes for emerging energy conversion technologies. Projects will focus on water electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells, high-performance computing for fluid mechanics, heat/mass/ion transport in catalytically reacting systems and new materials and manufacturing for electrochemical energy storage technologies.

"These will primarily focus on electrochemical energy storage and green hydrogen produced via electrolysis," said Fedorov.

Specifically, the project's overarching goal is to establish a comprehensive database of materials properties and energy conversion efficiency of a broad range of inorganic materials and support micro/nano-scale architectures for use in batteries, electrolyzers, and fuel cells.

This data will be obtained from multiple sources, including existing literature, experimental studies, and high-performance computations performed by collaborative teams of scientists from leading institutions worldwide. The data will then be processed using AI/machine learning (ML) algorithms to produce large language models of the material behavior, which could theoretically discover new material compositions and micro/nanostructures with improved properties for energy conversion. To further demonstrate the collaborative reach of the initiative, the models will be made available to the global scientific community via the internet.

The project's advances will result in the design and development of much-improved energy conversion and storage technologies, including solid/liquid-state Li-ion batteries, water electrolyzers for producing green hydrogen, ammonia and hydrogen fuel cells, carbon air batteries, and other devices.

This new program builds on the success of Fedorov’s previous collaboration that started in 2020, the Global Doctoral Research & Education Program in AI/ML Informatics for Energy Systems (InfoSyEnergy), between the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech that involved 15 Ph.D. students participating in multifaceted research collaborations with Japanese researchers. The InfoSyEnergy Consortium focused on technologies, systems, and scenarios of energy use and on exploiting advances in data science (AI and ML) for doctoral-level education to design a sustainable energy society on a global scale. Participants also engaged in professional meetings, workshops, and overseas internships.