Fuel cells have existed (at least in theory) since the early 1800s, but have spent much of their existence as laboratory curiosities. It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that fuel cells finally got their time in the spotlight with the first major application in the Gemini and Apollo space flights. While fuel cells have moved forward in the competitive field of energy storage, there are still many barriers that researchers are attempting to overcome. Especially today, with society making a conscious…
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Many things have changed since ECS was founded in 1902, yet the idea of providing an open forum for the community to discuss electrochemical and solid state science and technology remains the backbone of the Society. However, the way in which we communicate has changed since the establishment of ECS over 100 years ago. ECS is building a digital go-to source for content in electrochemistry and solid state science, including podcasts, videos, and original online news stories. Videos Through our...
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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…
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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…
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Notable for his identification of a new cathodes, Michael Thackeray helped lead to significant advances in lithium-polymer technology. Thackeray has focused his career on unraveling structure-electrochemical relationships in solid electrodes and electrolytes for battery systems and in designing new or improved materials. He was manager of the Battery Unit at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa before moving to Argonne in 1994. He was Director of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC),…
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Alvin Salkind devoted the majority of his life to the field of electrochemical science. Salkind has been the author or editor of 17 books. His first book, Alkaline Storage Batteries, with S. Uno Falk, was an ECS monograph. He wrote another title, Techniques of Electrochemistry with Ernest Yeager. Dr. Salkind is co-editor of 11 ECS Proceedings Volumes, and is the author of over 200 articles. He has over two dozen patents. Salkind was the first to build a battery into...
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Bor Yann Liaw is the Manager of the Energy Storage and Advanced Vehicles Department at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). There, he oversees an R&D program on batteries and advanced vehicle evaluations. Prior to INL, Liaw held a position at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, where he focused on advanced power source systems for vehicle and energy storage applications. Liaw has been in the field of electric and hybrid vehicle evaluation and advanced battery diagnostics and prognostics for the past three...
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John Bannister Goodenough was born in 1922, served in WWII, and obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago (1952). Throughout his career, Goodenough established himself as an internationally prominent solid state scientist, widely recognized for his role in the development of the rechargeable Li-ion battery. Goodenough is a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He shares the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with colleagues M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. He joined The University of Texas at Austin in...
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Nobuyuki Imanishi is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Mie University in Japan. His career in industrial electrochemistry began in 1982 as an undergraduate student at Kyoto University, followed by a PhD from his alma mater in 1993. Imanishi joined Mie University in 1990, where he focuses on functional materials and electrochemistry, especially energy conversion and storage materials, for instance, electrode materials for Li batteries and fuel cells, and solid-state electrolytes for those batteries. His recent research interests…
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ECS President | 2015-2016 Daniel A. Scherson is currently the Frank Hovorka Professor of Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University. He received a PhD in chemistry from The University of California at Davis under the late Joel Keizer working in the area of nonlinear, non-equilibrium thermodynamics. His interests in interfacial science prompted him to spend the next four years as a postdoctoral research associate in the laboratories of John Newman at UC Berkeley, Phil Ross at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory,…
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