Rohini Bala Chandran

We develop physics-based models and lab-scale measurements focusing on thermal systems and chemical reactor design for applications of energy conversion and storage. Our specific applications include thermal energy storage — storing energy in the form of heat, thermochemical (heat to chemical bonds) and electrochemical (electrons to chemical bonds) reactors that especially focus on fuel synthesis using renewable energy from feedstocks such as water, carbon dioxide and air. Data science is relevant and related to my research because we are now getting into the space of using data obtained from physics-based simulations to develop (1) reduced-order models and (2) digital twins. For example, we are currently working to develop inverse design models that take in experimentally measured spectroscopic data and turn it into material properties and material design guidelines. We are using decision trees to train forward models and using particle clustering for the inverse optimization.