
Luis Delfin
TomKat Graduate Fellow for Translational Research
Research Lab: Wendy Gu
Year Awarded: 2024
Luis Delfin is a Ph.D. candidate in Materials Science and Engineering. His research focuses on the additive manufacturing of metallic glasses, with the aim of developing more efficient soft magnets for electric devices. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso. Before joining Stanford, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory with the Fuel Cell Team.
Additive Manufacturing of Amorphous Steel Soft Magnets for High-Efficiency Electric Machines
The worldwide electricity demand is expected to reach ~60,000 TWh by 2050, which will lead to ~30 trillion metric tons of CO2. Every 0.1% improvement in efficiency will reduce CO2 emissions by hundreds of millions of metric tons at these scales. This can be achieved by developing more efficient soft magnetic materials to reduce the energy consumption of devices that distribute and use electrical energy, such as transformers, electric motors, and energy converters.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed new standards to raise the efficiency of transformers by 2027. DOE emphasizes that this will only be possible using amorphous steels that have approximately 10% of the energy losses of the crystalline, electrical steels used today. However, amorphous steels are very challenging and expensive to manufacture. We aim to develop additive manufacturing processes that simplify the production of amorphous steel transformers, significantly reducing overall costs and accelerating their adoption. This transition is projected to yield approximately $15 billion in savings and reduce CO2 emissions by 340 million metric tons over the next 30 years.