Friday 31 January 2025 2:00pm to 4:30pm
BMS LT, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry
About
The schedule for this event is as follows:
14:00-15:00 – three 20 minute presentations from early career researcher working on ‘energy’:
Dr Joshua Lawrence ‘Disentangling thylakoid membrane energy conversion with electrochemistry’
Ms Xinyu Liu ‘Structural disorder determines capacitance in nanoporous carbons’
Dr Sayan Kar ‘Solar-powered air-to-fuel synthesis for a circular carbon economy’
15:00-15:30 – coffee break
15:30-16:30 – Keynote Lecture by Prof Dame Clare Grey FRS (Geoffrey Moorhouse Gibson Professor of Chemistry)‘Understanding battery function - new metrologies, new chemistries and new insights’
Rechargeable batteries have been an integral part of the portable electronics revolution and are now playing a critical role in transport and grid applications to help mitigate climate change. However, these applications come with different sets of challenges. New technologies are being investigated and fundamental science is key to producing non-incremental advances and to develop new strategies for energy storage and conversion.
This talk will focus on our own work to develop NMR, MRI and new optical methods that allow devices to be probed while they are operating, from the local, to particle and then cell level. This allows transformations of the various cell materials to be followed under realistic conditions without having to disassemble and take apart the cell. Starting with local structure and dynamics, as measured by NMR, I will then show - with the optical methods - how the different dynamics can result in different intercalation mechanisms. A good example is our work on LiCoO2, where via optical approaches we were able to directly visualize movement of phase fronts as lithium is removed and inserted into this material. I will discuss our work on the application of electron spin resonance and dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) NMR to graphitic anode materials and lithium metal batteries, to understand battery degradation. Finally, new results on extremely high-rate batteries will be outlined and extensions of our new metrologies to study a wider range of electrochemical systems will be described.
16:30-18:00 – drinks reception in the Cyber Café – all welcome