Title:

Developing and applying new tools to understand how electrochemical devices function and fail – from batteries, supercapacitors to gated electronics.

Abstract:

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 new 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. New results on solution-based redox flow and extremely high-rate batteries will be outlined; I will then illustrate how our new metrologies can be extended to study a wider range of electrochemical systems.

Bio:

Clare P. Grey, FRS, DBE is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson and Royal Society Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge. 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, the director of the EPSRC Centre for Advanced Materials for Integrated Energy Systems (CAM-IES) and a founding 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) 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, an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and received a DBE in 2022. 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.