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Ph.D. Student working for Dr. Mainardi receives fellowship for summer experience in India

May 2013

Shawn Cole is one of Dr. Mainardi’s PhD students working on the modeling of PtRuSn fuel cell catalysts for ethanol oxidation who was awarded an Indo-US Science and Technology Forum fellowship to go to India this summer 2013. At the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Delhi, Shawn will get experimental experience in the lab of one of Dr. Mainardi’s collaborators, Dr. Suddhasatwa Basu, Professor & Head of Chemical Engineering Dept., IIT-Delhi,

to complement his computational efforts in the fuel cell area her, Prof. VK Mathur from the University of New Hampshire, and Prof. Basu collaborate.

Particularly, Shawn will get experience with catalysts fabrication, preparation, characterization (x-rays, SEM), and testing as ethanol fuel cell anode catalysts. Shawn is working on a particular stoichiometry: Pt2Ru2Sn. His focus will be this particular alloy. In addition, he can also test pure Pt, pure Ru, pure Sn, as well as binary combinations of those tree elements to compare fuel cell performance.