Towards a net zero world: Developing and applying new tools to understand how materials for Li and ‘beyond-Li’ battery technologies function

Cambridge Philosophical Society Honorary Fellows Lecture

A talk by Professor Dame Clare P. Grey (University of Cambridge)

Free and open to all; further details: https://www.cambridgephilosophicalsociety.org/events/event/prof-clare-grey

More powerful, longer-lasting, faster-charging batteries – made from increasingly more sustainable resources and manufacturing processes – are required for low-carbon transport and stable electricity supplies in a “net zero” world. Rechargeable batteries are the most efficient way of storing renewable electricity; they are required for electrifying transport as well as for storing electricity on both micro and larger electricity grids when intermittent renewables cannot meet electricity demands. The first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries were developed for, and were integral to, the portable electronics revolution. The development of the much bigger batteries needed for transport and grid storage comes, however, with a very different set of challenges, which include cost, safety and sustainability. New technologies are being investigated, such as those involving reactions between Li and oxygen/sulfur, using sodium and magnesium ions instead of lithium, or involving the flow of materials in an out of the electrochemical cell (in redox flow batteries). Importantly, fundamental science is key to producing non-incremental advances and to develop new strategies for energy storage and conversion.  

This talk will start by describing existing battery technologies, what some of the current and more long-term challenges are, and touch on strategies to address some of the issues.  I will then focus on my own work – together with my research group and collaborators – to develop new characterisation (NMR, MRI, and X-ray diffraction and optical) methods that allow batteries to be studied while they are operating (i.e., operando). These techniques allow transformations of the various cell components to be followed under realistic conditions without having to disassemble and take apart the cell. We can detect key side reactions involving the various battery materials, in order to determine the processes that are responsible ultimately for battery failure.  We can watch ions diffusing in, and moving in and out of, the active “electrode” materials that store the (lithium) ions and the electrons, to understand how the batteries function.  Finally, I will discuss the challenges in designing batteries that can be rapidly charged and discharged.  
 

Clare P. Grey, FRS, DBE is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge. She holds a Royal Society (RS) Professorship. She received a BA and D. Phil. (1991) in Chemistry from Oxford University. After post-doctoral fellowships in the Netherlands and at DuPont CR&D in Wilmington, DE, she joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SBU) in 1994. She moved to Cambridge in 2009, maintaining an adjunct position at SBU. She was the founding director of the Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center, a Department of Energy, Energy Frontier Research Center. She was the director of the EPSRC Centre for Advanced Materials for Integrated Energy Systems (CAM-IES) and is an Expert Panel member of the Faraday Institution. Recent honours/awards include the Société Chimique de France, French-British Prize (2017), the Solid State Ionics Galvani-Nernst-Wagner Mid-Career Award (2017), the Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievements in Magnetic Resonance (2018), the Italian Chemical Society Sacconi Medal (2018), the Charles Hatchett Award, IoM3 (2019), the RSC John Goodenough Award (2019), the Richard R. Ernst Prize in Magnetic Resonance (2020), the RS Hughes Award (2020), the Körber European Science Prize (2021) (for her contributions to the optimization of batteries using NMR spectroscopy) and the ACS Central Science Disrupters Prize (2022). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Electrochemical Society, and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance, a Foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received a DBE in 2023. Her current research interests include the use of solid state NMR and diffraction-based methods to determine structure-function relationships in materials for energy storage (batteries and supercapacitors), and conversion (fuel cells). She is a cofounder of the company Nyobolt, which seeks to develop batteries for fast charge applications.