Accomplishments
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Scientific Sprints: Speed Through Collaboration
As an innovative twist on traditional project management, JCESR conducts “Sprints,” small teams of dedicated researchers formed to solve a select research challenge within 1-6 months. Using the Sprint approach, JCESR takes a single question from our catalog of prioritized scientific challenges and dedicates a small, multidisciplinary team of 5-15 members to answer it. Read More
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The Electrochemical Discovery Laboratory
The Electrochemical Discovery Laboratory (EDL) — a key JCESR discovery tool located at Argonne — synthesizes high-quality materials for testing in beyond-lithium-ion batteries and characterizes their properties with state-of-the-art analytical techniques. Read More
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The Electrolyte Genome Project
Traditional chemistry relies on intuition and experience to select a few materials that might work well for new electrolytes. The Electrolyte Genome streamlines this process by evaluating thousands of materials by simulation on the computer and choosing the most promising few for synthesis in the laboratory. Read More
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Water as a Catalyst – Improving how Batteries Function
Anyone who has ever dropped a cell phone in the sink will tell you that electrical devices and water do not go together. However, a new study has shown that conventional wisdom may not hold on the molecular scale in some beyond-lithium-ion batteries. Read More
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Techno-Economic Modeling -- Building New Battery Systems on the Computer
JCESR is applying techno-economic models to project the performance and cost of a wide array of promising new battery systems before they are prototyped. The results from techno-economic modeling establish performance “floors” for discovery science teams looking for new anodes, cathodes, and electrolytes for a beyond lithium-ion battery, identifying those with the potential to meet JCESR’s goal and rejecting those unlikely to be effective. Read More
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Fitting the Lithium-Sulfur Battery with a New Membrane
The lithium-sulfur battery has higher energy storage capacity and lower cost than lithium ion. But there is a serious stumbling block. Polysulfides form in the cathode during battery cycling and pass through the membrane to contaminate the lithium metal anode. This results in a rapid decline in performance. JCESR researchers appear to have found a solution to the problem – the “polymer of intrinsic microporosity” (PIM). Read More
Latest Updates
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Efficient Intermolecular Charge Transport in π-Stacked Pyridinium Dimers Using Cucurbit[8]uril Supramolecular Complexes
In this work, we observe highly efficient intermolecular charge transport between stacked pyridinium dimers inside a synthetic host (cucurbit[8]uril, CB[8]) using single molecule techniques. Read More
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George Crabtree wins 2022 Energy Systems Award
The prestigious award recognizes the importance of transforming energy systems from fossil fuels to carbon-free technologies. Physicist George Crabtree of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has received the 2022 Energy Systems Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics ( … Read More
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Exploring the Synthesis of Alkali Metal Anti-perovskites
This work combines Density functional theory, quasi-harmonic approximation and experiments to explore the synthesizability of several marginally stable antiperovskites (APs) and overall, has obtained good agreement between experiments and computation. Read More
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Untapped Potential: The Need and Opportunity for High-Voltage Aqueous Redox Flow Batteries
Prior studies of the techno-economic design space for aqueous redox flow batteries (AqRFBs) have almost exclusively focused on cell potentials ≤1.5 V, due, at least in part, to the belief that battery operation at higher cell potentials in not feasible due to electrolyte decomposition. However, … Read More
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Intercalation of Ca into a Highly Defective Manganese Oxide at Room Temperature
Nanocrystals of layered MnOx containing a high concentration of atomic defects and lattice water are shown to have remarkable electrochemical activity towards Ca2+ , amounting to a capacity of ~130 mAh/g at room temperature. Multimodal characterization revealed the notable degree of intercalation by probing the … Read More