Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, April 11, 2005 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

George Crabtree

"The Hydrogen Economy: Challenges and Opportunities"

ABSTRACT -- Hydrogen offers a compelling solution to the energy challenges of supply, security, pollution, and climate change. Although today's technology enables several routes for producing, storing, and using hydrogen, none of them are yet competitive with fossil fuels for cost, performance, or reliability. Dramatic advances in the basic understanding of hydrogen and its interactions with materials are needed to bring a hydrogen economy to practical realization. The current state of hydrogen technology and the research challenges for creating a viable hydrogen economy will be discussed.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Crabtree received his Ph.D in Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to his current position as the director of the Materials Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory he was a professor in the Department of Physics at Northern Illinois University, a Research Scientist at CRTBT/CNRS and Visiting Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Grenoble, France and a Senior Physicist at the Materials Science Division Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Crabtree's awards include the Kamerlingh Onnes Prize, 2003, "for pioneering and seminal experiments which elucidated the vortex phase diagram in high temperature superconductors under various conditions of disorder and anisotropy", the University of Chicago Award for Distinguished Performance at Argonne National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy Awards (four) for Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in Solid State Physics, and the R&D 100 Award for the Magnetic Flux Imaging System. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Highly Cited Researcher in Physics. Dr. Crabtree's research interests are in: