Michael Mullins: Center for Fundamental and Applied Research in
Nanostructured and Lightweight Materials

Center for Fundamental and Applied Research in Nanostructured and Lightweight Materials

Michael Mullins is the director of Michigan Tech’s Center for Fundamental and Applied Research in Nanostructured and Lightweight Materials. The Center was recently awarded $1.23 million in continuing funding from the US Department of Energy, bringing its total DOE support to nearly $3 million.

“The thing that ties all this research together is the engineering of hybrid materials at the nano scale—polymers, ceramics and carbon,” says Mullins. “We are basically inventing new nanoscale materials.”

The center had its genesis almost nine years ago, when Mullins was tapped to serve on a National Academy of Sciences review panel charged with evaluating America’s transportation energy needs for the 21st century.

Super-clean hydrogen fuel cells seemed like a perfect alternative to greenhouse-gas producing internal combustion engines, but the panel identified some major shortfalls. “We determined that the main problem with fuel cells was the materials,” says Mullins. Specifically, they rely too heavily on precious metals, including platinum, to be affordable. The polymer electrolyte membrane, a key part of a fuel cell, also needed to function better at high temperatures and to better dissipate the main byproduct: water. To do that, different materials needed to be developed.
And since current fuel cells are fairly heavy, making the components lighter is advantageous.

Armed with this intelligence, Mullins wrote a proposal for a Michigan Tech research center that would focus on using better materials to build better fuel cells. The center has assembled the talents of several researchers working on a variety of projects—from Mullins’s present work on new more heat-tolerant materials to replace the polymer electrolyte membrane in fuel cells, to a nickel hydroxide battery electrode that can deliver more power than the batteries now in use at half the weight, to nanofibers that could be used as a lattice to regenerate nerve fibers. That work is being conducted in cooperation with Johns Hopkins University.

“Nanoscale materials are going to have the biggest impact on the field of photonics, electronics and bioengineering,” adds Mullins.  “We consider these to be the main targets of opportunity for the Center. The opportunities are huge.”

Mullins came to Michigan Tech in 1988 from the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, where he worked as a research engineer. At the time Mullins also taught graduate classes at the North Carolina State University, which greatly influenced his decision to seek a career in academia. He has been an NSF/NIST Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado, and also a research engineer the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. He has co-authored four books and over fifty reviewed publications. He has been a consultant to ERTH, Inc., ITT, Vesitech, Inc. and NASA Glenn Laboratories, among others. He holds three patents, served as principal investigator on over $10 million worth of funded research, and advised 28 graduate and post-doc students at Michigan Tech.