Recent Publications

Phenolic resin is a commonly employed Thermal Protection Material (TPM) for reentering spacecrafts. Understanding pyrolysis of phenolic resin is therefore key in predicting the material response during ablation. Experiments provide data at realistic reentry conditions but lack microscopic insight, while Molecular Dynamics (MD) studies provide microscopic insight but only up to timescales of a few nanoseconds and typically at unrealistically high temperatures. In response to this problem, we present the first Accelerated Molecular Dynamics study of the pyrolysis of a phenolic resin precursor molecule using Parallel Replica Dynamics (PRD). We build and validate a PRD framework applicable to the study of small phenolic resin systems and achieve timescales of several microseconds at temperatures as low as 1600K, representing a 1000-fold increase in simulation time compared to past MD studies at comparable conditions. 

The work of solar desalination and salt harvesting, led by Dr. Xiaolong Ma, Spatially Decoupling Heating and Evaporation for Convection-Enhanced 3D Solar Evaporation With Continuous Salt Harvesting, is published in Advanced Functional Materials. Conventional solar evaporators require the same material to simultaneously perform solar absorption, water transport, and evaporation, limiting both efficiency and salt management. In this work, we developed a novel 3D Solar Convective Evaporator (SCE) that spatially separates heating and evaporation through a bottom-heating architecture. The heated base induces natural convection, enhancing sidewall evaporation and vapor removal while keeping the evaporation surface free from photothermal coatings. The system achieves an 82.8% higher evaporation rate than conventional 2D evaporators and surpasses traditional 3D designs under optimized conditions. Importantly, salt crystallization is confined to the bottom region, enabling continuous operation and salt harvesting in seawater and hypersaline brines up to 17.5 wt.% salinity. This simple and scalable design offers a promising solution for solar desalination, brine management, and resource recovery.

Molten solar salt is widely used for thermal energy storage in concentrated solar power plants, but gradual thermal degradation produces nitrite (NO₂⁻), an important indicator of salt aging and changing chemistry.

This work develops a custom high-temperature cyclic voltammetry platform to directly detect nitrite in molten solar salt at 290 °C, without salt sampling, cooling, or dilution. The method provides two quantitative calibration modes: a nitrite-related anodic peak for early-stage degradation and an anodic slope response for higher nitrite concentrations. Both showed strong linearity, with R² values close to 0.98.

The electrochemical results were validated against oxygen-evolution measurements from thermally aged salts and remained reliable in the presence of common impurities. This study provides a practical basis for future online monitoring of molten-salt aging in CSP thermal energy-storage systems.