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Radical pairing: an enabling platform for practical metal-free grid scale energy storage

To achieve Net Zero by 2050, the power sector will need to be decarbonised fully over the next decade. This is critical not just as a direct means of reducing emissions, but of ensuring a smooth transition in other related sectors including heavy industry, heating, and chemical production. To this end, existing power infrastructure will need greater shares of renewable energy. This brings with it a key challenge: the additional strain placed on a grid infrastructure designed around dispatchable rather than intermittent energy sources. Thus, there is a growing need for grid flexibility solutions to balance supply with demand over days, weeks and months. Among such solutions, long duration energy storage (LDES) solutions show particular promise with flow battery based LDES accounting for a majority of new projects to date. However, nearly all such flow systems are based on metals (e.g., V, Zn, Fe and Cr), which can not only be costly, but are frequently toxic, sensitive to trace impurities including air, require highly corrosive conditions to operate effectively, are susceptible to geopolitics, and can be carbon-intense due to current mining practices. By contrast, emerging organic redox active materials have the potential to not only eliminate many of these concerns, but access completely new performance characteristics leveraging the greater degrees of molecular and supramolecular complexity that these materials inherently possess. In this seminar, I will discuss how the almost inevitable generation of free radical species in such organics can be harnessed towards new design possibilities, including high voltage operation and arbitrary stability to air. I will also discuss how emerging operando metrologies can be used to extract sufficient mechanistic information to facilitate such directions moving forward.

Speaker: Mark Carrington, UC Berkeley

Tuesday, 02/11/25

Contact:

Website: Click to Visit

Cost:

Free

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Latimer Hall

UC Berkeley
Room 120
Berkeley, CA 94720