Four projects spearheaded by Tickle College of Engineering faculty and graduate students were selected as awardees for this year’s UT Chancellor’s Innovation Fund.
The Office of Research, Innovation & Economic Development (ORIED) established the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund in 2023 to raise awareness, promote innovation, and support entrepreneurship for UT’s promising innovators. Through this program, UT will help enable commercialization of new technology, support the launch of technologybased startups, and fund entrepreneurial opportunities for researchers across the campus.
The winning projects received $50,000 to support commercialization and entrepreneurial efforts.
This year’s CBE Award Winners are:
Tom Zawodzinski and Brian Washington
Development of alumnium-air batteries
The global push for sustainable energy requires solutions across a wide range of applications. Batteries are crucial to addressing this need. Current battery technologies, which rely on a steady supply of expensive and often scarce materials and processes, pose significant environmental challenges and longterm scalability issues. This project offers a solution through the development of mechanically rechargeable metal-air batteries, more specifically aluminum-air batteries.
The project’s technology introduces a novel mechanical recharge design that allows for the ease of replenishment of aluminum materials within the configured battery systems. Unlike traditional aluminum-air batteries that require complete replacement of the aluminum anode, the project’s system enables the battery to be refueled with scrap or waste aluminum materials almost instantly for constant energy output.