MSE Colloquium: Peter Chupas, Energy Storage: Correlating Structure-Property Relationships from the Atomic to the Macro Scale

Argonne National Laboratory

All dates for this event occur in the past.

264 MacQuigg Labs
105 W. Woodruff Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
United States

Abstract

Energy storage has emerged as a critical technology for the 21st century, with applications in portable electronics, transportation (including hybrid-electric and electric vehicles), and in electric grid related applications.  This energy storage revolution has transformed communication and transportation, and has broadly impacted society, from developing to industrial nations.  Transformational opportunities in these applications are still possible through improvements to cycle life, capacity, rate and cost.  Improvements, however, will require detailed understanding of mechanisms in current batteries, as they relate to, for example capacity loss, with the concurrent development of new prospective materials.  Within the energy storage community there is growing recognition of the need to study materials under realistic conditions, with both time resolution that matches the cycle rate, and that probe multi-length-scale phenomena. With respect to, batteries this covers all distances from the atomic scale to that of the full electrode. 

This talk will cover our work in the development of methods that allow devices to be probed while they are operating, specifically applying X-ray methodologies.  This allows individual components of a battery cell to be probed under realistic conditions without having to take the battery apart.  This talk will focus on recent work applying these operando studies.  This will include (1) studies of Mg electrolytes for ”beyond-lithium” rechargeable batteries, (2) the study of metastable/non-equilibrium states in olivine cathodes, (3) the mapping of the electrodes using micro-diffraction to understand transport and kinetics in composite electrodes.

Bio

Peter Chupas is a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the Photon Science Directorate.  He received his B.S. (1999) in chemistry from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and his Ph.D. (2003) in Materials Chemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He joined the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow in 2003, and became a permanent staff scientist 2005, moving through from Assistant Chemist (2005), Chemist (2008), and Group Leader (2009).  He currently works in the directorate office establishing directions for science programs. His honors and awards include Crain’s 40 under 40 (2013) and the Sidhu Award from the Pittsburg Diffraction Society (2006).  His current research interests include the development and use of diffraction based methods to determine the structure function relationships in materials for energy storage and conversion.