Robert Palumbo

Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Forget the gas pump – think sunshine!

Robert Palumbo

Ask Robert Palumbo how we’ll avert the next national – or global – energy crunch and he’ll tell you to look to the heavens. Palumbo, who just stepped down as head of the High Temperature Solar Technology Laboratory at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, has devoted his career to teaching and the study of cutting edge solar energy research and he believes this clean, abundant energy source is the key to the world’s ever-increasing energy appetite.

Palumbo’s specific research area is turning concentrated sunlight into fuels that can be stored and circulated throughout the world. “Our current problem is that light is not being distributed everywhere people live and it is not available all the time. To maximize the tremendous potential of solar energy it has to be captured and stored for use when and where it’s not available,” Palumbo explains.

He and his students are hoping to solve this problem by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight. The super hot rays would heat solar chemical reactors to temperatures reaching 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In the extreme heat, both water and zinc oxide break down, creating simple hydrogen and zinc – in other words, storing sunlight as chemical energy. Both of these elements can be used to produce fuel which can then be contained in fuel cells and easily transported wherever and whenever power is needed.

Were this technology possible, the consequences could be enormous beginning with the eradication of global dependence on an ever-dwindling oil supply as well as lessening of global warming trends. Palumbo also points to our nation’s safety as a crucial reason for vigorously pursuing solar energy. “Probably the most important reason I could give for this research is our national security. All terrorists have to do is knock out the oil supply in the Mid East and it would devastate the United States, Japan, and Europe. One-third of our energy supply would be gone! We don’t have a response to that scenario that could be quickly implemented. That scenario would be like Hurricane Katrina but over the entire country,” Palumbo says.

OK, but is concentrated sunlight as an alternative fuel source – and a response to a terrorist catastrophe – possible in our lifetime? “I think going to the moon was harder! If you look at what we knew in 1963 about space exploration – the leaps we made to accomplish that mission were much bigger than the ones we need to make solar work,” Palumbo says. “Solar energy could be used as a major path to producing renewable fuels in our lifetime, but it’s up to scientists to communicate and industry and our government to fund some initial high-risk enterprises.”

Palumbo’s interest in solar energy dates back to the mid 70s when he was an undergrad at Valpo. He remembers the very moment the notion captured his imagination. “I was in a Thermodynamics course and the professor introduced the concept of transforming energy from one form to another. I decided on the spot this was the area I wanted to focus on. I think I expected that some day a United States president would appear on television announcing that within 10 years we would do something to make renewable energy a significant part of the world economy – like Kennedy did with the space program. I knew I wanted to be a part of that!”

Though that dramatic presidential announcement never came, Palumbo pursued his research, first at the University of Minnesota (as a graduate student) and then back at Valparaiso as a professor. Along the way he linked up with the Scherrer Institute and over the years has been the recipient of three National Science Foundation grants. In 1993, Palumbo was also awarded a Fulbright Scholarship which he used to study cutting edge solar applications in one of the world’s greatest solar labs situated in the Pyrenees mountains of southern France.

Now Palumbo is on a mission to create a world-class solar research lab for undergraduates at Valparaiso. Through the years, Valpo engineering students have helped Palumbo with his research, co-authoring papers for peer-reviewed journals, traveling with him to do overseas research, and building models for testing solar theory. He says, “Probably no one in the Unites States could in their greatest imaginative state visualize an undergraduate institution with this type of thing. But that’s what excites me – doing things that people cannot imagine.”

If Palumbo is able to realize his dream of creating a lab for solar research at Valpo, plenty of business leaders, policy makers, and scholars will have their imagination stretched. And if he is right – that using sunshine as a major fuel source is possible in our lifetimes – VU’s lab could be on the frontline of turning that prediction into reality and Palumbo’s engineering students would literally be engineering their own future.

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