Speaker: Xiaoliang Wei
Place: Yuanwanglu, 7th floor, Building Chao Kuang Piu, School of Materials Science & Engineering
Title: Redox-Active Organic Materials for Redox Flow Batteries
Time: 10th Dec., 2019, 10:00 a.m.
Inviter: Professor Yinzhu Jiang
Abstract: Redox flow batteries have significant attributes of excellent scalability and design flexibility that especially are beneficial for grid energy storage applications. Conventional flow batteries use metal-based inorganic materials, but the widespread market penetration of the flow battery technology is still constricted by major disadvantages including high chemical cost or capacity loss. Currently, a variety of redox-active organic materials (ROMs) have demonstrated encouraging physico-chemical properties and performance characteristics potentially addressing the above counts. However, only very few ROM candidates have showed promising metrics that meet the commercialization requirements. The challenges such as low chemical stability, limited solubility, and stringent operation conditions need to be addressed through more in-depth efforts.
Our team is working towards both the material innovation and basic science of ROMs in the context of aqueous and nonaqueous flow battery electrolytes. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts in the development of new ROM structures for flow batteries and the investigations of fundamental solvation chemistry to understand related mechanisms. The solvation structures of selected ROMs have been deciphered via multimodal spectroscopic and computational approaches to gain insights of key solubility-controlling factors. The studies of the pathway of parasitic side reactions have suggested design principles for achieving chemically stable ROMs. The understandings gained through these studies have led to significant improvement in energy density and long cyclability in ROM-based flow batteries.
Biography: Prof. Xiaoliang Wei is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). His research interests are in electrochemical energy conversion and storage with focused areas of materials and system development, solvation chemistry, interface phenomena and mechanisms. Prof. Wei received his PhD in chemistry from Brown University in 2009 and his BS from University of Science and Technology of China in 2003. He was a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) before joining IUPUI in 2018.
