From left to right: Elizabeth Biddinger, City College of New York; Joaquin Rodriguez Lopez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Joshua Snyder, Drexel University

The ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship Selection Committee has selected three recipients who will receive a minimum of $50,000 each for fellowships for projects in green energy technology. The winners are Professor Elizabeth Biddinger, City College of New York; Professor Joaquin Rodriguez Lopez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Professor Joshua Snyder, Drexel University.

The ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship, a partnership between The Electrochemical Society and Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA), a division of Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc. (TEMA), is in its second year. A diverse applicant pool of more than 100 young professors and scholars pursuing innovative electrochemical research in green energy technology responded to ECS’s request for proposals.

“Scientists and engineers seek to unveil what is possible and to exploit that knowledge to provide solutions to the myriad of problems facing our world,” says ECS Executive Director Roque Calvo. “We are proud to have the continued support of Toyota in this never ending endeavor to uncover new frontiers and face new challenges.”

The ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship aims to encourage young professors and scholars to pursue research in green energy technology that may promote the development of next-generation vehicles capable of utilizing alternative fuels.

Global development of industry and technology in the 20th century increased production of vehicles and the growing population have resulted in massive consumption of fossil fuels. Today, the automotive industry faces three challenges regarding environmental and energy issues:

(1) Finding a viable alternative energy source as a replacement for oil
(2) Reducing CO2 emissions
(3) Preventing air pollution

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A new collaborative study from Delft University and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) shows a highly-efficient, simple way to produce hydrogen through solar water-splitting at a low cost.

The team of researchers, including 2016 PRiME Plenary speaker Michael Graetzel, state that by using Earth-abundant catalysts and solar cells, effective water-splitting systems could sustainably produce affordable hydrogen.

Graetzel, known for his low-cost, high-efficiency solar cell that won him the 2010 Millennium Technology Grand Prize, helped lead the effort by separating the positive and negative electrodes using a bipolar membrane, leading to a simple yet effective new method.

Hydrogen economy

The technology behind water-splitting is essential in an economy shifting toward more hydrogen use as alternative fuels. While efficient methods of generating hydrogen do currently exist, the techniques used to produce the gas consume large amounts of fossil fuels.

Moving toward a hydrogen economy could help alleviate the effects of climate change, but only if the means used to produce the gas are also sustainable. This is where water-splitting comes in.

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Image: Toshiyuki Imai/Flickr

A new report by TechXplore examines a recently published review paper on the potential in nanomaterials for rechargeable lithium batteries. In the paper, lead-author and ECS member Yi Cui of Stanford University, explores the barriers that still exist in lithium rechargeables and how nanomaterials may be able to lend themselves to the development of high-capacity batteries.

When trying to design affordable batteries with high-energy densities, researchers have encountered many issues, including electrode degradation and solid-electrolyte interphase. According to the paper’s authors, possible solutions for many of these hurdles lie in nanomaterials.

Cui’s comprehensive overview of rechargeable lithium batteries and the potential of nanaomaterials in these applications came from 100 highly-reputable publications, including the following ECS published papers:

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Cathode particles treated with the carbon dioxide-based mixture show oxygen vacancies on the surface.
Image: Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion, UC San Diego

An international team of researchers has recently demonstrated a 30 to 40 percent increase in the energy storage capabilities of cathode materials.

The team, led by ECS member and 2016 Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award winner, Shirley Meng, has successfully treated lithium-rich cathode particles with a carbon dioxide-based gas mixture. This process introduced oxygen vacancies on the surface of the material, allowing for a huge boost to the amount of energy stored per unit mass and proving that oxygen plays a significant role in battery performance.

This greater understanding and improvement in the science behind the battery materials could accelerate developments in battery performance, specifically in applications such as electric vehicles.

(READ: “Gas-solid interfacial modification of oxygen activity in layered oxide cathodes for lithium-ion batteries“)

“We’ve uncovered a new mechanism at play in this class of lithium-rich cathode materials,” says Meng, past guest editor of JES Focus Issue on Intercalation Compounds for Rechargeable Batteries. “With this study, we want to open a new pathway to explore more battery materials in which we can control oxygen activity.”

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With atmospheric greenhouse gas levels at their highest in history, many researchers have been contemplating one question: How can we reutilize carbon dioxide?

One new study reports a new catalyst with the ability to execute highly selective conversion of carbon dioxide into ethylene, producing an important source material for the chemical industry.

The push to convert carbon dioxide into useful chemicals is not a completely novel concept among the scientific community. For this study, researchers opted to make the process more efficient by implementing a new catalyst with higher selectivity to produce more useful chemicals and less unwanted byproducts.

Ruhr-Universitӓt Bochum PhD student and ECS student member, Hemma Mistry, veered away from the traditional catalyst used in this process and instead opted for copper films treated with oxygen or hydrogen plasmas. By doing this, Mistry was able to alter surface properties for optimal performance.

(MORE: Read Mistry’s past ECS Meeting Abstract entitled, “Selectivity Control in the Electroreduction of CO₂ over Nanostructured Catalysts.”)

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When lithium-ion pioneers M. Stanley Whittingham, Adam Heller, Michael Thackeray, and of course, John Goodenough were in the initial stages of the technology’s development in the 1970s through the late 1980s, there was no clear idea of just how monumental the lithium-based battery would come to be. Even up to a few years ago, the idea of an electric vehicle or renewable grid dependent on lithium-ion technology seemed like a pipe dream. But now, electric vehicles are making their way to the mainstream and with them comes the commercially-driven race to acquire lithium.

Just look at the rise of Tesla and success of the Nissan LEAF. Not only are these cars speaking to a real concern for environmental protection, they’re also becoming the more affordable option in transportation. For example, the LEAF goes for less than $25,000 and gets more than 80 miles per charge. Plus, electric vehicles can currently run on electricity that’s costing around $0.11 per kWh, which is roughly equivalent to $0.99 per gallon. The last year alone saw a 60 percent spike in the sale of electric vehicles.

“Electric cars are just plain better,” says James Fenton, director of the Florida Solar Energy Center and newly appointed ECS Secretary. “They’re cheaper to buy up front and they’re cheaper to operate, which years ago, was not the case.”

All things considered, lithium may just be the number one commodity of our time.

But this movement is not specific to the U.S. alone. In Germany – a country dedicated to a renewable future – there is a mandate that all new cars in the country will have to be emission-free by 2030. Similarly in Norway, the government is looking to ban gasoline-powered cars by 2025.

So with the transportation sector heading away from gasoline-powered cars and toward lithium battery-based vehicles globally, what will that do to lithium supplies?

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Elon Musk via Insider Monkey/Flickr

By now you’ve probably heard of the big merger between automotive innovator Tesla and rooftop solar guru SolarCity. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, claims that the integration will create “the world’s first vertically integrated energy company,” set to offer the full spectrum of clean energy products to customers.

While both companies have gotten a lot of attention from investors over the years, there has been a lot of skepticism when it comes to the financial future of the joining of these two companies.

First, neither companies have made any money independently last year. In fact, combined they lost $1.7 billion.

But the financial losses are not the real concern. As MIT Technology Review points out, the technology that would make an end-to-end clean energy system feasible has not yet been developed by either company.

Musk’s vision for the newly integrated company is to set up consumers to solely utilize renewable energy. That would mean electric vehicles, rooftop solar panels, and of course, a battery to store energy when the sun goes down.

Although Tesla has already premiered their home Powerwall battery, it fell short of expectations. The seven-kilowatt-hour battery was expected to be able to store enough energy to power your home and send energy back to the grid (converting homes to microgrids) for a flat rate of $3,000, but the actual cost turned out to be closer to $10,000.

Pair that cost with SolarCity panels and analyses show that you’ll be paying over double for your electricity than a typical rate user.

“At the end of the day, the Powerwall has the same Li-ion battery cells in it as any other Li-ion-based storage product: Asian-sourced batteries that are arranged in packs,” Jay Whitacre, ECS member and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told MIT Technology Review. “It’s basically off-the-shelf cell technology.”

ECS Vice President Johna Leddy is an established researcher in electrochemical power sources and a highly respected mentor to the students of the Leddy Lab. Always the educator, Leddy’s most recent side project was creating a door plaque that explains her research to those passing by at the university (see below). The Venn diagram pictured on right is featured (click on it to expand). Leddy explains herself:

The Venn diagram is a map of my research at the current time. Energy and electrocatalysis are at the center and various things evolve from there. Largely, we focus on unusual ways to electrocatalyze reactions that are important in energy generation and storage.

The unusual means of electrocatalysis include: introduction of micromagnets on the electrode to increase rates of electron transfer; use of ultrasound in a thin layer to activate the electrode surface; and modification of electrodes with algae to make ammonia.

At the edges of the Venn diagram are places where these fundamental studies are implemented in energy technologies and voltammetric analysis. The bottom ring is a list of the tools that we use. It all ties together: theory and fundamentals to experiments to devices and back to theory. Experiments inform theory and devices, that lead to questions that generate more experiments.

Image: Greg Robson/Wikimedia Commons

University of Iowa researchers have teamed up with California-based startup HyperSolar to progress the science in producing clean energy from sunlight and water. The goal of this research is to develop a way to efficiently and sustainably produce low-cost renewable hydrogen for commercial use.

Hydrogen has huge potential as an alternative form of energy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, hydrogen has the highest energy content of any fuel we use today (carbon dependent fuels included).

But hydrogen is not a naturally occurring element on this planet, so it needs to be produced. Currently, most hydrogen is produced via steam reforming – a process using fossil fuels and creating carbon dioxide. While the end produce is clan, renewable energy, the means of getting to that product were carbon dependent. The new study hopes to help move hydrogen production away from the traditional means of creation and toward electrolysis, which requires only electricity and water to create hydrogen.

“Developing clean energy systems is a goal worldwide,” says Syed Mubeen, HyperSolar’s lead scientist and chemical engineering professor at the University of Iowa. “Currently, we understand how clean energy systems such as solar cells, wind turbines, et cetera, work at a high level of sophistication. The real challenge going forward is to develop inexpensive clean energy systems that can be cost competitive to fossil fuel systems and be adopted globally and not just in the developed countries.”

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One pair of ZPower hearing aid batteries can keep more than 200 disposable batteries out of the landfill.
Image: ZPower

Lithium based technologies have been dominant in the battery arena since Sony commercialized the first Li-ion battery in 1991. ECS member Jeff Ortega, however, believes that a different material holds more promise than its lithium competitor in the world of microbattery technology.

During the 229th ECS Meeting, Ortega presented work that focused on the analysis of data from commercially available rechargeable Li-ion and Li-polymer cells. He then compared the silver-zinc button cells of ZPower, where he currently serves as the company’s director of research. His results showed that the company’s silver-zinc button cells offer both greater capacity and greater density than their Li-ion and Li-polymer counterparts. Additionally, Ortega stated that the cells are also generally safer and better for the environment.

According to Ortega, the small silver-zinc cells have 57 percent greater energy density than both types of lithium based calls. Their potential applications including medical devices, body worn sensors, wearables, and any other microbattery application that demands long wear time. Currently, ZPower has implement these cells in hearing aid technologies.

“The ZPower Rechargeable System for Hearing Aids makes it easy to convert many new and existing hearing aids to rechargeable technology,” says Ortega in a statement. “The Rechargeable System offers a full day of power, charges overnight in the hearing aids, takes the place of an estimated 200 disposable batteries and lasts a full year. The ZPower hearing aid battery is replaced once per year by a hearing care professional, so the patient never has to touch a hearing aid battery again.”