Author Archives: joshuagallaway

Lead pipe corrosion in Flint

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There’s a wonderful paper by Olson et al. in Environmental Science & Technology Letters called Forensic Estimates of Lead Release from Lead Service Lines during the Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan. From the abstract:

The findings provide evidence that selective dissolution of lead phosphate minerals occurred because of the absence of orthophosphate during the crisis.

I’m teaching the chemical engineering intro class at Northeastern this semester, and I’m putting in some information from this paper. Mismanagement of the water supply in Flint is a pretty perfect example of how not to do chemical engineering. The piping infrastructure in Flint required orthophosphate treatment of the water, and for some reason this practice was stopped.

Next stop: Boston

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I’m in the middle of packing, headed to Boston where a new lab awaits. Even though I’m extraordinarily busy, I feel the pressure to get some new battery content up on the website. This will have to do for now. See you soon!

National Synchrotron Light Source II User Profile

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The Brookhaven National Lab newsroom has a nice profile about the work we did at the SRX beamline as one of the first user groups to work there. As soon as beamtime proposals were being accepted in 2015, we submitted one to study the mechanism of a new battery formulation we had just discovered (and which has since been published). Since then we made three trips to collect data, all of which were insightful. I just gave a preliminary account of what we found in a talk at ECS, and I hope to have the paper out in the fall.

In the article I tried to lay out why the SRX beamline was the perfect tool to do what we wanted, electrochemically. If you’re interested in the simultaneous oxidation/reduction of several different elements (in our case Mn, Bi, Cu) SRX lets you map them spatially and also sample their redox states on the fly.

Many thanks to Laura Mgrdichian who interviewed me and Gautam and wrote the article. She started by asking “What draws you to this research?” and I’m always happy to answer that. Electrochemistry is instrumental in getting society to the ultimate goal of energy sustainability.

Some exciting news: New job

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I’m happy to announce that beginning this fall I’ll be the DiPietro Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University. There I’ll continue working to improve kinetics and transport within complex electrochemical systems. You can expect batteries, phase changes, and synchrotron science, as well as some new tricks. It’s an understatement to say I’m looking forward to it. See you soon.