Please join us next Thursday, May 7th at 9:30am in the Pancoe Auditorium for a student seminar by Sapna Ramesh from the Lopez group.
Sapna will present a seminar titled "Probing Reduction Intermediates and Products of Electrolytes in Lithium Metal Batteries.”
Energy storage is integral to the widespread adoption of clean energy technologies, such as electric vehicles, to mitigate climate change. Among energy storage technologies, lithium metal batteries (LMBs) offer great potential due to lithium’s high theoretical specific capacity and low electrochemical potential, enabling batteries that surpass conventional lithium-ion batteries in energy density. However, LMBs are yet to be commercialized due to irreversible capacity loss from electrochemically inactive, or “dead” lithium, which forms due to unstable plating and stripping and continuous reactions between the lithium metal anode and electrolyte to form the solid electrolyte interphase. Electrolyte design has emerged as a critical strategy to tune interfacial reactions on the lithium metal anode and limit capacity loss, and understanding the structure-reactivity relationships underpinning performance is critical to designing highly functional electrolytes.
In this seminar, I will discuss my work developing techniques to improve the understanding of how electrolytes break down on the lithium metal anode. I will describe the novel application of spin trapping and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy to detect radical intermediates generated during electrolyte reduction. We apply this technique to study a high-performance electrolyte solvent, fluoroethylene carbonate, clarifying the role of organic interphase species in this system. Taken together, this work provides insight to the mechanisms that underpin interphase formation in high Coulombic efficiency systems, enabling next generation electrolyte design for LMBs.
Cost: Free
Olivia Wise
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