Seminar: From lithium to zinc-ion batteries: Electroactive cathode materials
About the event
Presented by
Guozhong Cao, Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Abstract
Lithium ion batteries have achieved pervasive applications in many aspects in current technologies and played an indispensable role in our mobile life. Many active research efforts on innovative materials and device architecture are certainly to advance the lithium ion battery further towards higher energy and power density as well as long cycling life. However, the further spread applications of lithium ion batteries are humbled by the limited resources and consequent rising prices of lithium and cobalt metals; search for new battery materials and device design becomes imperative and has attracted increasing attention in the materials and battery communities. In this presentation, I will first review what we have learned from our study on the cathode materials for lithium ion batteries, and then present our most recent efforts to apply those knowledge to cathode materials for aqueous zinc ion batteries. The incorporation pre-insertion of inactive metal cations has demonstrated to have improved the structural instability, much enhanced storage capacity and kinetics, achieved significantly high energy conversion efficiency. Further study revealed the incorporation or pre-insertion of inactive metal cations plays a complex role in determining the crystal structure, thermodynamic and transport properties, stability, and the resulting battery performances.
