Perk up people, this is the Forbes list 30 under 30 in energy edition. According to Forbes, each year their reporters spend months combing through possible contestants. Questionnaires, online digging, contact recommendations, and a panel of expert judges all help sift through to the top remaining candidates.

This year, Forbes focused on the movers and shakers of the battery field. With a worldwide $200 billion a year investment in wind and solar power generation projects, the revolution in renewables, and the transition to low-carbon energy sources is undeniable. And for that reason, we highlight three—just the tip of the iceburg—from the top thirty list.

Meghana Bollimpalli/Credit: Forbes

I don’t know what you were doing when you were 17, but Meghana Bollimpalli, a student at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas was inspired by a seminar on energy storage. Bollimpalli began working towards figuring out a way to make supercapacitors from cheaper materials. She discovered a mixture of tea powder, molasses, and tannin, with a pinch of phosphorous and nitrogen, could achieve the same performance as a platinum-based electrode, for just $1 each, taking home the 2018 Intel Foundation Young Scientist award. Not bad for a high school student. (more…)

The 2018 San Francisco Section Daniel Cubicciotti Student Award Goes to Yuzhang Li!

Yuzhang Li is a PhD student working with Professor Yi Cui on next-generation energy storage technologies at Stanford University. His research approach seeks to tackle problems from both an applied and fundamental perspective, which is necessary for the development of high energy density batteries. (more…)

Raymond Smith, recipient of the ECS Norman Hackerman Young Author Award

Raymond Smith was presented with the Norman Hackerman Young Author Award for his paper on “Multiphase Porous Electrode Theory” published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. The award recognizes the best paper published by young authors or co-authors in JES the prior year.

Smith, who holds a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT and works as a senior engineer at Tesla, said he was blown away when he heard he was nominated for the award.

“Being in the community and engaging in this way has been special,” says Smith, who was presented with the award at AiMES 2018 in Cancun, Mexico. “Coming to the meeting has provided great motivation.”

His paper aimed to unify work that his team and other teams have done in the field in order to highlight connections that weren’t obvious before.
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By: Marca Doeff, ECS Battery Division Chair

Marca Doeff, a staff scientist in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and chair of the ECS Battery Division, discusses the future of batteries. Doeff covers advancements and developments, notable contributors and leaders, corporate sponsors and supporters, upcoming meetings and awards, all within the battery field.

What are a few current areas of battery research the division is focusing on?
Anything having to do with lithium-ion batteries, since they are turning out to be the real workhorses of the battery world. While the chemistry is fairly mature at this point, there is still a lot of work going on in silicon anodes, trying to find better cathode materials, and improving electrolytes.

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George E. Blomgren is the author of “The Development and Future of Lithium Ion Batteries,” the most-downloaded Journal of The Electrochemical Society paper since April 2017. To put this in perspective, Blomgren’s article has had 26,817 downloads this year. That is over 4.4 times the average amount received by the next nine most-downloaded JES papers for this year. Since its publication in December 2016, Blomgren’s paper has been downloaded a total of 53,575 times.

We decided to revisit the man with the incredible stats, and ask, how did you do it?

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Deadline for Submitting Abstracts
December 28, 2018
Submit today!

Topic Close-up #2

Symposium A04: Battery Student Slam 3

Symposium Focus: This special symposium is dedicated to students working on energy storage and energy conversion. In the student slam, we offer an opportunity for students to present flash oral presentations of their work in a 10-minute time slot. All students enrolled at any valid degree-granting institution may submit an abstract describing the presentation. Of particular interest are new materials and designs, performance studies, and modeling of all types of batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells, including aqueous, non-aqueous, polymer electrolytes, solid electrolytes, and flow systems. We strongly encourage students to submit their papers to this symposium instead of other symposia sponsored by the Battery Division at this meeting. (more…)

2018 awards winners Han (left) and Lacey (right) with Caroline Cloutier (center) representing Mercedes Benz R&D.

Steven Lacey is one of the winners of the 2018 Battery Division Student Research Award sponsored by Mercedes-Benz Research & Development (check out the other winner, Fudong Han).

Lacey’s passion for electrochemistry and engineering began at a young age when he realized the need for a more fuel-efficient means of transportation while restoring classic cars with his father.

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Photo Credit: Essential Energy Everyday

Lead batteries have been around 1859. They’ve changed our lives, giving us car batteries, standby batteries in case power outages, electric vehicles, and more. Still, despite all this progress, no one really understands the inner workings of lead batteries. According to Essential Energy Everyday, for the last century, lead battery manufacturers have invested much of their research in creating function and production, without fully understanding the underlying chemistry. However, that’s soon said to change as lead batteries are headed for a “high-tech makeover.”

A team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, Advanced Lead Acid Battery Consortium, and Electric Applications have joined forces to realize the potential of a venerable battery technology.

Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science and ECS member, says this is a beautiful example of how synergy between industry and science can drive innovation. (more…)

Abstract submission for ECEE 2019 is now open!

Join us at the Electrochemical Conference on Energy and the Environment (ECEE 2019): Bioelectrochemistry and Energy Storage, which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland from July 21-26, 2019 at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Center.

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Most take the world around them for granted, never expecting anything extraordinary out of what’s always proven to be, well, extra ordinary. According to Futurism, that’s what many felt about a methylene blue dye used to dye fabric in textile mills. Its remnants even considered a nuisance and a hazard, often making its way from the mill and into the environment, where it’s no easy task to clean up.

So researchers from the University at Buffalo began experimenting with the industrial dye, in an attempt to reuse the wasted material, turning the methylene blue wastewater into an environmentally safe material – in batteries.

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