Understanding battery function- new metrologies, new chemistries and new insights (15/01/26)”
Speaker and Affliation:
Prof. Clare P.Grey
Professor, Yusuf Hamied Department Of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
When?
15th January, 2026 (Thursday), 3.00 PM (India Standard Time)
Where
KPA Auditorium, Dept. of Materials Engineering, IISc, Bangalore
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 lecture will provide an overview of some battery chemistries and challenges in the field, illustrating some aspects via our own work. Specifically, I will describe our development of 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. Examples include silicon anodes, and “beyond-lithium” technologies (e.g., sodium-ion batteries, and lithium sulphur and air). Starting with local structure and dynamics, as measured by NMR, I will then show - via 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 then discuss the application of a series of ex- and in-situ metrologies to study a wide variety of batteries. For example, the development of operando NMR and EPR methods to study organic-based redox flow batteries will be outlined, illustrating the information can be extracted from these techniques. 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 function and degradation will be described. NMR methods will then be used to quantify impurities in solid state battery electrolytes, to correlate impurities with transport and dendrite formation. Finally, I will then end by describing our work on fast charging batteries and extensions of our metrologies to other electrochemical systems.
Speaker Bio:
Clare P. Grey, FRS, DBE is the Geoffrey-Moorhouse-Gibson and Royal Society Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University. After receiving a BA and D. Phil. from Oxford University she was a post-doctoral fellow at Nijmegen and at DuPont CR&D. She joined the faculty at Stony Brook University in 1994, moving to Cambridge in 2009, maintaining an adjunct position at Stony Brook. She was the director of the EPSRC Centre for Advanced Materials for Integrated Energy Systems (CAM-IES) and a member of the Expert Panel of the Faraday Institution. Recent honours/awards include Honorary PhD Degrees from the Universities of Orleans (2012) and Lancaster (2013), Warwick (2024), the Royal Society Davy Award (2014), the RSC John Goodenough Award (2019), the Richard R. Ernst Prize in Magnetic Resonance (2020), the RS Hughes Award (2020) for contributions in the field of energy, the (2021) Körber European Science prize and the ACS Central Science Disruptors & Innovators Prize (2022). She is a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance and an International member of the National Academy of Sciences. 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.