As the Panda Faculty Scholar in Sustainability in Engineering and Design, Prof. Bergthorson is leading an international research effort around the concept of metals as sustainable carbon-free fuels, with the support of the European and Canadian Space Agencies.
Prof. Bergthorson’s team at McGill is working to improve our understanding of both the fundamentals of metal-fuel combustion science and the development of novel metal-fuel technologies. His team is also developing a technology to generate hydrogen on demand from the reaction of metal fuels with water.
Prof. Bergthorson is also co-leading a McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative Theme on CleanTech for Climate Action and is leading a project on metal fuels that includes researchers across the Faculty of Engineering, as well as Management and Economics. This project aims to address both the technical and the socio-economic barriers to achieving a carbon-free energy system based, in part, on metal fuels.