Advanced Energy Materials Paper Published
Recently a collaborative work with Oi-Man Leung at the Unversity of Southampton was published in Advanced Energy Materials. This study represents a culmination of efforts on both the electrochemistry and applications of this new electrolyte, and also the mechanistic analyses to elucidate the molecular-scale processes within. Here, we demonstrate a huge 0.3 V improvement in the oxidative stability vs. the standard chloroaluminate ionic liquid electrolyte. This increase is coupled with the inherent mechanical improvements of a polymer electrolyte, without any major sacrifice of the electrolyte conductivity. NMR spectroscopy reveals aluminium chloride crosslinks between poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) chains and some curious behvaiour of silica particles in this system...
PhD Defense
Today I sucessfully defended my PhD thesis "Molecular Elucidation of Reaction Mechanisms in Aluminum and Lithium Metal Batteries by Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy and Electrochemical Methods". My PhD journey has been a greatly enjoyable 5 years and I have far too many people to thank for getting me to this point. However, I must acknowledge my committee members, Prof. Alex Couzis, Prof. Ruth Stark, Prof. George John, Prof. Elizabeth Biddinger, and my advisor Prof. Robert Messinger for their great support today. Special thanks to Rob for all the hard work we put in together!
Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters Paper Published
The latest work from our group "Reversible Zinc Electrodeposition at −60 ℃ Using a Deep Eutectic Electrolyte for Low-Temperature Zinc Metal Batteries" was published today. In this work we demonstrate an electrolyte with a deep-eutectic point to enable reversible zinc electrodeposition down to temperatures of -60 ℃. We make electrolytes in different ratios of [EMIm]TFSI with gamma-butyrolactone (GBL) which are probed electrochemically to determine their macroscopic properties, and further analysed at the molecular level via NMR spectroscopy and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to explain the differences in performance from an atomistic approach.