Nikhil Koratkar

Professor of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

  • Troy NY

World Renowned, Highly Cited Expert in Battery Energy Storage

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Spotlight

3 min

Rensselaer Experts Available To Discuss Federal Infrastructure Proposal

Federal lawmakers are discussing sweeping infrastructure improvements to transportation, manufacturing, and digital infrastructure, among other projects. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the country’s first technological research university, are leaders in improving the sustainability, safety, and performance of transportation systems, energy systems, and wireless networks, among other areas. Experts in civil and environmental engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering are available to discuss what impact large-scale infrastructure projects could have on a multitude of systems that impact people across the country. Improving Transportation and Freight Systems: José Holguín-Veras, the director of the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment at Rensselaer, and Cara Wang, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer, are leading experts on the role of infrastructure on freight systems and transportation, and the environmental impacts of both. Their research focuses on improving transportation and freight systems in order to increase efficiency, reduce traffic congestion and, in turn, reduce vehicle emissions. Professors Holguín-Veras and Wang are available to discuss the ways in which improved roads, bridges, railways, and ports could affect shipping and delivery of goods, congestion in cities, and emissions in the environment. They can also discuss what their research has uncovered that could guide policymakers as new projects are planned. Expanding Broadband: Alhussein Abouzeid, a professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering, is an expert in networked systems, the smart grid, and the Internet of Things. Some of his research focuses on modeling wireless networks, as well as wireless spectrum and policies to optimize its use. Koushik Kar, also a professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering, researches communication networks, particularly modeling, analysis, and optimization of the internet and wireless networks. Both researchers are available to discuss the ways in which digital infrastructure can meet future needs. Next-Generation Manufacturing: Part of the President’s infrastructure plan would allocate $300 billion to manufacturing. Next-generation manufacturing is a central area of expertise at Rensselaer, with the Institute’s Manufacturing Innovation Center and the Rensselaer Manufacturing Innovation Learning Lab. Faculty and staff from both state-of-the-art centers, including John Wen, the head of the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, who is an expert in robotics, are available to discuss the role that Rensselaer research plays in preparing the manufacturing sector for the nation’s current and future needs. Upgrading Electric Grid, Investing in Clean Energy: Joe Chow, Jian Sun, and Luigi Vanfretti, all professors in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, hold extensive expertise in modeling, monitoring, and optimizing the electric power grid. Their work will be integral to the development of a cleaner, more resilient power grid, especially as clean energy sources are increasingly integrated. Christopher Letchford, the head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is a global expert in wind engineering. His expertise includes wind power modeling, wind climatology, and the impacts of climate change on infrastructure, transportation, and energy production. Each of these experts is available to discuss the importance of upgrading the nation’s electric grid, and the move toward clean and renewable energy. Boosting Electric Vehicle Numbers: Part of President Biden’s plan focuses on increasing the number of electric vehicles on the road. A key component of improved and more cost-efficient electric vehicles is greener, cheaper, more efficient, and longer-lasting batteries. Nikhil Koratkar, an endowed chair professor of mechanical engineering, is a leading expert in energy storage technologies. He has dedicated his research to improving the batteries that society already uses, while also developing batteries of the future. He can discuss current battery technology and how advancements in energy storage research could help put more electric vehicles on United States roads. Upgrading Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater Systems: Chip Kilduff, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is an expert in managing water quality and water treatment. He has a particular focus on water treatment approaches like membrane and adsorption-separation processes. Kilduff is available to discuss the importance of upgrading water and wastewater systems and what his research has uncovered about the best methods for managing water quality.

Nikhil KoratkarJosé Holguín-VerasLuigi VanfrettiChristopher Letchford

1 min

Environment-Friendly Compound Shows Promise for Solar Cell Use

A widespread transition to solar energy will depend heavily on reliable, safe, and affordable technology like batteries for energy storage and solar cells for energy conversion. Nikhil Koratkar, an endowed professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer, has dedicated much of his research to exploring ways to make a wide-range of batteries more efficient, affordable, and safe. In research published in Advanced Functional Materials, Koratkar and a team of engineers, material scientists, and physicists demonstrated how a new material — a lead-free chalcogenide perovskite — that hadn’t previously been considered for use in solar cells could provide a safer and more effective option than others that are commonly considered. “The National Academy of Engineering has defined 14 grand challenges; one of those is to make harvesting energy from the sun cheaper and more widespread,” Koratkar said. "That’s the motivation of this work, to come up with new materials that could rival the efficiency of silicon, but bring down the cost of manufacturing solar cells, and that is the key to achieving this goal.” Koratkar is available to talk about this recent discovery, and his broader expertise and research in energy storage.

Nikhil Koratkar

2 min

Is This New Potassium Metal Battery Design the Future of Energy Storage?

From cell phones, to solar power, to electric cars, humanity is increasingly dependent on batteries. As demand for safe, efficient, and powerful energy storage continues to rise, so too does the call for promising alternatives to rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which have been the dominant technology in this space. Led by Nikhil Koratkar, researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered a way to overcome a persistent challenge known as dendrites in order to create a metal battery that performs nearly as well as a lithium-ion battery, but relies on potassium — a much more abundant and less expensive element. “In terms of performance, this could rival a traditional lithium-ion battery,” said Koratkar, an endowed professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer. While metal batteries have shown great promise, they have also traditionally been plagued by accumulation of metal deposits, called dendrites, on the anode. Over time, Koratkar explains, the conglomerates of potassium metal become long and almost branch-like. If they grow too long, they will eventually pierce the insulating membrane separator meant to keep the electrodes from touching each other and shorting out the battery. Koratkar and his team found that by operating the battery at a relatively high charge and discharge rate, they can raise the temperature inside the battery in a well-controlled manner and encourage the dendrites to self-heal off the anode. The researchers previously demonstrated a similar method of self-healing with lithium metal batteries, but they found the potassium metal battery required much less heat to complete the self-healing process. That promising finding, Koratkar said, means a potassium metal battery could be more efficient, safe, and practical. “I want to see a paradigm shift to metal batteries,” Koratkar said. “Metal batteries are the most efficient way to construct a battery; however, because of this dendrite problem they have not been feasible. With potassium, I’m more hopeful.” This research, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is just the latest development in Koratkar's contributions to battery research. He is available to discuss a range of possible futures for energy storage.  

Nikhil Koratkar

Areas of Expertise

Energy Storage
Batteries
Nanostructured Materials
Nano-Composites
Nano-Coatings

Biography

Nikhil Koratkar joined the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in January 2001 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and to Full Professor in 2009. In 2011, Koratkar was also appointed a Full Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer. In 2012, Koratkar was appointed the John A. Clark and Edward T. Crossan Chair Professor in Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Professor Koratkar is a winner of the NSF CAREER Award (2003), RPI Early Career Award (2005), the Electrochemical Society's SES Young investigator Award (2009), American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award (2015) and the IIT-Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award (2019). In 2016, Koratkar was elected a Fellow of the ASME. He has published a book on graphene as an additive in composite materials and over 200 archival journal papers (> 21,000 Citations, H-Index = 68). His publications include one in Science, one in Nature, one in PNAS, three in Nature Materials, four in Nature Communications, nine in Advanced Materials, fourteen in ACS Nano, six in Nano Letters, seven in Advanced Functional Materials and eight in Small. In 2018, Clarivate Analytics named him in their highly cited researchers list (top 1% by citations). Koratkar has obtained over $10 Million in research grants from several agencies including NSF, NYSERDA, ONR, ARO, AEC and Industry. In 2010, Koratkar was appointed Editor of CARBON (Elsevier).

Professor Koratkar's research has focused on the synthesis, characterization, and application of nanostructured materials. This includes graphene, carbon nanotubes, transition metal dichalcogenides, phosphorene, tellurene, perovskites as well as metal and silicon nanostructures produced by a variety of techniques such as mechanical exfoliation, chemical vapor deposition, and oblique angle sputter and e-beam deposition. He is studying the fundamental mechanical, electrical, thermal and optical properties of these one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) materials and developing a variety of composites, coating and device applications of these low dimensional materials. He serves as scientific advisor to two start-up companies aimed at commercializing next-generation energy storage solutions.

Education

University of Maryland at College Park

Ph.D.

2000

IIT-Bombay

B.Tech

1995

University of Maryland at College Park

M.S.

1998

Media Appearances

Graphene Foam Sensors Cheaply Detect Trace Particles in Air Ten Times Better Than Current Tech

Popular Science  online

2011-11-23

Nanotechnology as a discipline is bleeding-edge cool, but so often we hear more about its amazing potential than its practical application. So it's always refreshing to catch wind of a story like this: Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have developed and demonstrated a small, relatively inexpensive, and reusable sensor made of graphene foam that far outperforms commercial gas sensors on the market today and could lead to better explosives detectors and environmental sensors in the very near future.

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'Nanoscoops' Could Spark New Generation of Electric Automobile Batteries

U.S. News and World Report  online

2011-07-05

AN ENTIRELY NEW TYPE OF nanomaterial developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could enable the next generation of high-power rechargeable lithium (Li)-ion batteries for electric automobiles, as well as batteries for laptop computers, mobile phones, and other portable devices.

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Leap in Sniffing: Nanotubes Can Name That Gas

The New York Times  online

2003-07-22

It's as small as a quarter. It's as fast as blink of an eye. It's as safe as a portable CD player.

Using nanotube technology, two professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Pulickel M. Ajayan and Dr. Nikhil Koratkar have built a new device to detect gases. They hope it can eventually be used to increase national security and make homes safer.

The research, financed in part by the United States Army, was published in the July 19 issue of Nature.

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Articles

In situ healing of dendrites in a potassium metal battery

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Prateek Hundekar, Swastik Basu, Xiulin Fan, Lu Li, Anthony Yoshimura, Tushar Gupta, Varun Sarbada, Aniruddha Lakhnot, Rishabh Jain, Shankar Narayanan, Yunfeng Shi, Chunsheng Wang, and Nikhil Koratkar

2020-03-02

The use of potassium (K) metal anodes could result in high-performance K-ion batteries that offer a sustainable and low-cost alternative to lithium (Li)-ion technology. However, formation of dendrites on such K-metal surfaces is inevitable, which prevents their utilization. Here, we report that K dendrites can be healed in situ in a K-metal battery. The healing is triggered by current-controlled, self-heating at the electrolyte/dendrite interface, which causes migration of surface atoms away from the dendrite tips, thereby smoothening the dendritic surface. We discover that this process is strikingly more efficient for K as compared to Li metal. We show that the reason for this is the far greater mobility of surface atoms in K relative to Li metal, which enables dendrite healing to take place at an order-of-magnitude lower current density. We demonstrate that the K-metal anode can be coupled with a potassium cobalt oxide cathode to achieve dendrite healing in a practical full-cell device.

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Aqueous lithium-ion batteries with niobium tungsten oxide anodes for superior volumetric and rate capability

Energy Storage Materials

Aniruddha S. Lakhnot, Tushar Gupta, Yashpal Singh, Prateek Hundekar, Rishabh Jain, Fudong Han, Nikhil Koratkar

2019-12-11

Lithium-ion batteries with aqueous electrolytes have substantial safety and cost benefits over the flammable, expensive and moisture sensitive organic electrolytes used in current batteries. However aqueous batteries suffer in terms of a reduced electrochemical stability window and offer much lower energy and power densities relative to batteries with organic electrolytes. Here we report that the use of niobium tungsten oxide anodes in conjunction with lithium manganese oxide cathodes and water-in-salt electrolytes, enables aqueous lithium-ion batteries with outstanding volumetric capacity and rate capability. Our battery could be cycled stably with high coulombic efficiency and a volumetric capacity of ~200 Ah l−1 was observed at 1C rate, which is much higher than state-of-art graphite (50–110 Ah l−1). Moreover, the battery could be cycled at high rates – increasing the charge/discharge rate by an order of magnitude (0.5C–5C) resulted in only about 25% reduction in capacity. The volumetric energy and power density of our full-cell device is far superior to what was been reported for “aqueous” lithium-ion batteries and is attributed to the dense-packing of micron size niobium tungsten oxide particles in the anode, as well as the abundance of tunnels within the particles that allow fast diffusion of lithium ions. The facile synthesis, ease of handling, safety (non-flammable nature) and high-performance, makes aqueous lithium-ion batteries with niobium tungsten oxide anodes an attractive alternative to traditional batteries, especially in applications where high volumetric energy and power density are desired.

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Vanadium disulfide flakes with nanolayered titanium disulfide coating as cathode materials in lithium-ion batteries

Nature Communications

Lu Li, Zhaodong Li, Anthony Yoshimura, Congli Sun, Tianmeng Wang, Yanwen Chen, Zhizhong Chen, Aaron Littlejohn, Yu Xiang, Prateek Hundekar, Stephen F. Bartolucci, Jian Shi, Su-Fei Shi, Vincent Meunier, Gwo-Ching Wang & Nikhil Koratkar

2019-04-16

Unlike the vast majority of transition metal dichalcogenides which are semiconductors, vanadium disulfide is metallic and conductive. This makes it particularly promising as an electrode material in lithium-ion batteries. However, vanadium disulfide exhibits poor stability due to large Peierls distortion during cycling. Here we report that vanadium disulfide flakes can be rendered stable in the electrochemical environment of a lithium-ion battery by conformally coating them with a ~2.5 nm thick titanium disulfide layer. Density functional theory calculations indicate that the titanium disulfide coating is far less susceptible to Peierls distortion during the lithiation-delithiation process, enabling it to stabilize the underlying vanadium disulfide material. The titanium disulfide coated vanadium disulfide cathode exhibits an operating voltage of ~2 V, high specific capacity (~180 mAh g−1 @200 mA g−1 current density) and rate capability (~70 mAh g−1 @1000 mA g−1), while achieving capacity retention close to 100% after 400 charge−discharge steps.

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