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Portrait ofDarlene Slattery.Darlene Slattery
Senior Research Chemist
Advanced Energy Research

Phone:
(321) 638-1449
Fax:
(321) 638-1010
Email:


Education:

Ph.D., Chemistry
Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida, 1999


Research Focus:

Dr. Slattery's primary area of research has been in the storage of hydrogen to be used for automotive purposes. She has investigated magnesium hydride, lanthanum magnesium hydride, and more recently, complex hydrides such as lithium aluminum hydride. This work was all funded by the Department of Energy.

Additional hydride research has been performed by Dr. Slattery under FSEC's NASA program. In this work, she has been studying methods for separating hydrogen from the helium that NASA uses as a purge gas. Another part of this study has involved using hydrides to recover the hydrogen that NASA loses to boil-off.

Dr. Slattery has also done extensive work on the photocatalytic production of hydrogen and this was the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation. In this work, she showed that organic pigments could act as semiconductor particles, using sunlight to split water into its constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. While efficiency is low using these materials, they are significantly cheaper than inorganic semiconductor materials.

Dr. Slattery is the author or co-author of over thirty publications, which include peer-reviewed articles, conference proceedings and contract reports and one recent patent application. She has also been an invited keynote speaker on hydrogen storage at Battelle Institute and Oak Ridge National Lab.

Several representative publications are:

  • Franjic, M.; Hampton, M.D.; Lomness, J.K.; Slattery D.K. "Effect of Ti x Al y catalysts on hydrogen storage properties of LiAlH 4 and NaAlH 4", International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Accepted.
  • Cauceglia, D.; Hampton, M.D.; Lomness, J.K.; Slattery, D.K.; and Franjic, M. "Hydrogen uptake characteristics of mechanically alloyed Ti-V-Ni" Submitted to J. Alloys and Compounds.
  • Slattery, D.K., C.A. Linkous, N.E. Gruhn, J.C Baum, "Semi-Empirical MO and Voltammetric Estimation of Ionization Potentials of Organic Pigments. Comparison to Gas-Phase Ultraviolet Photoelectron Spectroscopy." Dyes and Pigment. 2001, 49, 21-27.
  • Slattery, D.K ., M.D., Hampton, J.K. Lomness, N. Najafi-Mohajeri, M.Franjic, "Hydrogen Storage Using Complex Hydrides", Fuel Chemistry Division Preprints, 2002, 48(1), 277.