Toney

Breakthroughs in materials science are helping to improve tomorrows energy storage

Daniel Morton — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:18:38 +0000

Breakthroughs in materials science are helping to improve tomorrows energy storage Daniel Morton Fri, 08/15/2025 - 09:18

Daniel Morton

The future of energy storage is being written at the molecular level. As renewable energy is transforming how we generate electricity, battery storage technologies are emerging as the backbone of a resilient, flexible power grid. Advances in materials science are key to unlocking their massive potential to change the way we interact with energy.

Effective and sustainable energy storage is critical to a modern and resilient power grid. Independent of how the electrons are generated, the ability to flexibly store and supply electricity strengthens the grid and improves our energy security.

The path to a reliable and sustainable energy economy runs directly through better, more efficient batteries. Today’s power grid demands storage solutions that are more efficient, built from materials that are abundant, affordable and environmentally responsible. This intersection of performance and sustainability presents one of the most exciting tensions in modern energy research.

In the last six months RASEI Fellows have publish more than ten research articles that explore a range of materials science challenges associated with battery storage, developing solutions at the molecular level that could have profound impacts on how we store energy on the grid-scale, here we highlight a selection of this recent work.

Why Batteries Are Essential For Grid Flexibility

Battery storage offers exceptional flexibility to a modern power grid, providing rapid response capabilities that can balance supply and demand within seconds rather than minutes or hours. A key benefit of battery systems is that they can be deployed virtually anywhere, from urban centers to remote locations, creating opportunities for more resilient and distributed grids that adapt to local needs and conditions.

Materials Science Engineering Charges Innovation

At its core, battery performance is fundamentally about engineering better materials: how molecules are structured, how electricity flows, and how charged particles travel through carefully designed and engineered structures. This is where cutting-edge materials science research is essential, providing the tools to better design battery components at the molecular scale to achieve faster charging, longer lifespans, and higher energy storage. These are features that will be critical as we scale up to grid-level storage.

Consider how a typical rechargeable battery, such as a lithium-ion battery, works: charged particles (such as lithium ions) move between the two sides of the battery during charging and discharging. Think of it like cars moving between parking lots (the two sides of the battery, the positive and negative electrodes). The ability to park more cars represents the ability to carry more energy. When you use the battery the cars (the lithium ions) travel between the lots through a highway (the electrolyte). To use the highway, they have to pay a toll. In this case they give up an electron, which produces the electricity that powers your device. When you charge the battery the cars move back to the original lot, but you have to give them an electron to go back through the toll.

Repeated charging and discharging can cause damage to the parking lots, the highway between them, and the cars can even get stuck. Building better electrodes (parking lots), more effective electrolytes (the highway) and better understanding of how the charged particles act (the cars), teams can develop more effective and robust energy storage.

Recent Research Highlights

Boron-Alloyed Silicon Nanoparticle Anodes can improve the performance for lithium-Ion Batteries.

Read the article here

By mixing some boron with your silicon you can make a more robust battery electrode!

With a theoretical energy density ten times higher than graphite, Silicon (Si) has inspired interest as a next generation anode active material for lithium-ion batteries. In the general analogy, this is building a more robust parking lot for the charged state. When you charge and discharge a lithium-ion battery, on a molecular scale this is achieved by the pumping in, and pumping out of lithium ions (cars going in and out of the parking lot), which come with a significant volume change. (This would be like the floors of a multi-story parking lot changing size as cars drive in and out. Realistic on the atomic scale, not so much on the car-scale…) Silicon-based anodes have been found to be unstable to this constant change in volume which can lead to instability and failure. One strategy to address this is to move from having the silicon anode being a solid slab, to being a series of nanoparticles, which helps to reduce this mechanical stress, but this comes with another problem, the increased surface area of the particles allows more chemical side reactions, which is another big problem. There has been much research investigating the materials science and surface chemistry to reduce the unwanted side reactions. A key finding from recent research is that the best way to prevent unwanted side reactions is to essentially isolate the silicon surface from the electrolyte media it is in. This is where this research, led by RASEI Fellow Nate Neale, comes in.

By mixing, or alloying, the silicon with boron, the anodes were found to perform better and last longer. The more boron added to the nanoparticles, the more robust they were. In fact, the team saw a 3x improvement in lifetime by incorporating boron. The team proposes that by making the nanoparticles out of a mixture of silicon and boron, the presence of the boron creates an “electric double layer” effect, essentially providing a protective layer at the surface of the nanoparticle, shielding from the unwanted side reactions. This saw some real improvements in the performance of the electrolytes, not just a 3x improvement in the calendar lifetime, but an 82.5% capacity retention after 1000 cycles, the pure silicon electrodes reached the end-of-life (<80% capacity retention) in fewer than 400 cycles under similar conditions.

Boron creates a strong electrical field at the nanoparticle surface that attracts and concentrates ions from the surrounding electrolyte, forming a stable, dense layer that acts like a permanent shield. This work reveals an underexplored parameter in the design and optimization of silicon anodes that could prove valuable in the next-generation of lithium-ion batteries.

This breakthrough could accelerate the adoption of silicon anodes in battery applications, such as electric vehicles, where longer-lasting batteries are essential to address range anxiety. The research team is now working to identify the optimal silicon-boron ratio that maximizes both capacity and longevity, potentially bringing us closer to the next generation of high-performance lithium-ion batteries.

How Molecular Shape Impacts Battery Performance: New Insights for Flow Batteries

Read the article here

Making seemingly minor molecular changes to the structure of charge storage chemicals can have significant impacts on the performance of redox flow batteries.

Redox Flow Batteries offer a promising solution for large-scale energy storage. Unlike the lithium-ion batteries in your phone, flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes that flow through the system. This design allows them to store massive amounts of energy for long periods, making them ideal for stabilizing electrical grids.

However, making these batteries practical requires finding the right chemical compounds that are stable, efficient, and cost effective. This article describes collaborative research that includes teams led by RASEI Fellow Mike Toney and former RASEI Fellow Mike Marshak. The teams were exploring the optimization of chromium-based compounds as charge carriers. The aim was that by changing the structure of the organic chelate ligand that surrounds the chromium atom, they could better understand the relationship between structure and performance and use that understanding to design more efficient systems.

Two very similar chromium compounds were prepared; CrPDTA and CrPDTA-OH, which differ only by the addition of a single hydroxyl group (-OH) on the organic framework. Hydroxy groups are often added to compounds to improve their solubility in water, but in this case the team observed a drop in the performance of the molecule. The hydroxylated compound showed:

Slower reaction rates – The CrPDTA-OH transferred electrons 100 times more slowly than the non-hydroxylated.
Reduced efficiency – battery efficiency dropped from 99.3% to 98.2%.
Increased hydrogen gas production – more energy was wasted producing unwanted hydrogen gas in a side reaction instead of being stored.

It’s kind of like if some of the cars had one flat tire. They are going to be worse at transporting charge back and forth, and they might do things you don’t want them to.

Using a suite of advanced characterization techniques the team discovered that the addition of the hydroxyl group caused a distortion of the molecular shape around the central chromium ion. This distorted shape weakened the bonds between the metal atom and the organic chelate ligand, which reduced the efficiency of electron transfer.

This research reveals a fundamental principle for designing redox flow battery materials: molecular geometry matters immensely. The chromium atom needs to adopt an octahedral arrangement to work efficiently. Any distortion of this shape leads to reduced performance. This study also confirms why maintaining the precise structure is so important. It prevents water molecules from interfering with the chromium atom, which would cause the unwanted production of hydrogen gas instead of energy storage.

Researchers Discover The Hidden ‘Dance’ Of Ions That Could Inform The Design Of Grid-Scale Energy Storage

Read the article here

Insights into the processes of charge movement in the electrolyte could inform future battery design

The electrolyte of the battery is the highway that connects the two parking lots together. This research that brings together an international collaborative team, including researchers from three US universities, three National labs, and researchers from the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and RASEI Fellow Mike Toney, reveals important features of this highway in zinc-ion based batteries.

While most people are familiar with lithium-ion batteries in their phones and devices, zinc-ion batteries offer compelling advantages for large-scale electricity storage. Zinc is more abundant and thus affordable, zinc-ion batteries use water-based electrolytes that are much less likely to overheat or explode, Zinc-ion batteries can pack a lot of energy into a small space, they are very energy dense.

The electrolyte is the media through which the charged ions pass through during charge and discharge cycles. In our metaphor the electrolyte is the highway on which the cars travel back and forth. The properties of the electrolyte can dictate a number of features of the batteries performance, how fast it charges, how long it lasts, and how much energy it can store. This research has explored how these ions, or ‘cars’, act during transport, and they have observed that it is not plain driving, the ions cluster and form convoys as they move through the electrolyte. The way the zinc sulfate ions travel is far more dynamic and complex than previously understood.

Using advanced x-ray techniques in combination with advanced computer modeling the team were able to explore the molecular structure of the electrolyte at different stages of the charge / discharge cycle. They found that the ions don’t just float around independently, instead they form clusters, like cars forming a convoy. It was observed that the zinc ions surround themselves with exactly six water molecules and clusters formed in a range of sizes, from just 2 ions all the way up to 22 ions.

You might expect that they clusters would move more slowly, like a traffic jam on the highway, but the team found that while the clusters do reduce conductivity, the battery still works. Critical to this is the timing of the clusters. The clusters are incredibly short lived, existing for only picoseconds (trillionths of a second) at a time. Instead of having a traffic jam, it is like having really busy traffic that is moving so fast that it is constantly reorganizing itself and so it never actually gets stuck.

This offers insights that can be applied in future battery designs; Ions form diverse, temporary partnerships that vary in size and composition, the system is constantly undergoing reorganization, transport happens both through vehicular motion (cars moving through the highway), and hopping between clusters (it would be like someone jumping from car to car in an action movie). These insights could improve future electrolyte design which could improve battery performance and potentially open the door to new battery chemistries that could be used for a broader range of applications, such as grid-scale storage.

By developing a more informed understanding of how charge is transported in electrolytes we can improve our designs in the future. Instead of trying to avoid cluster, we can harness it to improve the efficiency of charge transport in battery technologies.

Inside the battery: X-Ray Vision Reveals How Sodium Really Moves and Stores Energy

Read the article here

Sodium-ion batteries have the potential to be game changers for grid-scale storage with their abundance, low cost, and sustainability advantages over existing lithium-ion technologies. A key hurdle in their development is that we don’t yet fully understand how sodium actually moves and stores energy on the molecular level. This international collaboration, led by RASEI Fellow Mike Toney, uses cutting-edge X-ray techniques and computational modeling, provides insight into these promising battery chemistries.

Sustainable battery technologies are central to the modern power grid and meeting the growing demand of electrification technologies, such as electric vehicles. Among the growing array of battery chemistries Sodium-Ion Batteries (NIBs) address many of the challenges associated with lithium-ion batteries, and can even benefit from the work done to bring lithium-ion technologies to scale. This is swapping out the cars in our analogy from lithium-ions to more affordable sodium-ions. Sodium is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, making it dramatically more affordable and sustainable than lithium. While NIBs don’t yet match the energy density of lithium-ion based designs, they are ideal for grid storage applications where space is less constrained, but cost and sustainability matter enormously. Furthermore, NIBs can be produced using lithium-ion manufacturing facilities, enabling rapid deployment without the associated infrastructure costs.

The main hurdle has been developing anode materials that efficiently store and release sodium ions. Hard carbon shows promise but understanding exactly how sodium storage works at the molecular level remained elusive—a critical gap for large-scale manufacturing.

This research uses a combination of advanced X-ray spectroscopy techniques and computational modeling to peer inside the electrodes of a working NIB to watch the storage process unfold in real-time. Put simply they explored the details of a three step system where sodium ions first attach to surface defects in the hard carbon, then squeeze between the carbon layers, and finally cluster into the pores of the anode, providing insights and a road map for the design of NIBs in the future.

To gain more information about the details of these processes the team using X-ray total scattering, a technique that bounces high-energy X-rays off atoms and analyzes the scattered pattern to map exactly where atoms are positioned relative to each other. Think of it like echolocation to see in the dark, but for atomic structures! By taking a series of ‘snapshots’ of the NIBs at different stages of charging, the researchers could track how sodium atoms moved and arranged themselves during the process. The X-ray data reveals amazing levels of detail, revealing distinct signatures for different types of sodium storage, distinguishing between sodium atoms stuck to the surface defects of the hard carbon and those squeezed between carbon sheets, and those atoms clustered in pores.

Through a combination of these experimental results and advanced computational modeling the team were able to piece together a three-stage sequence to better understand the movement of sodium ions during charging. First, the sodium ions target high-energy defect sites on the hard carbon surfaces, like easy to access parking spots with the strongest attraction. In the second stage, as the prime parking spots fill up, sodium begins what the researchers call “defect-assisted intercalation’, where the defects are used as entry points to slip between the carbon layer (like cars going to other levels of a multistory parking lot), causing the carbon layers to expand slightly. In the third stage, in the low-voltage plateau region, sodium continues to intercalating between the layers, while also filling up the nanoscale pores and forming metallic clusters. Crucially the evidence from the X-ray analysis shows that the size of these clusters is dependent on the pore size – larger pores in the carbon processed at higher temperatures produced bigger sodium clusters, directly linking the battery’s microstructure to its storage capacity.

This molecular-level understanding has the potential to transform NIB development from educated guesswork into precision engineering. Guided by this three stage roadmap, battery researchers can now strategically design hard carbon materials, altering defect concentrations to optimize initial storage, controlling pore sizes to maximize capacity, while balancing these factors to minimize the irreversible trapping that reduces overall battery lifetimes. The combined X-ray spectroscopy and computational modeling technique demonstrated in this research has the potential to provide a powerful new toolkit for studying other battery chemistries in the future. By revealing more about how sodium energy storage works, this research brings us closer to sustainable solutions for grid-scale energy storage, a critical piece in the puzzle for a modern, resilient, and sustainable energy economy.

August 2025

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Profile: Collin Sindt

Daniel Morton — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 18:59:39 +0000

Profile: Collin Sindt Daniel Morton Mon, 07/07/2025 - 12:59

Daniel Morton

Collin Sindt, a graduate student in Chemical and Biological Engineering, co-advised by RASEI Fellows Seth Marder and Mike Toney, explores the molecular structure of advanced materials for harvesting solar energy. As part of his collaborative work Collin recently spent a few weeks doing research over in Berlin, Germany. We caught up with Collin to learn a little more about his work, what led him to this research, and find out more about his time in Germany.

Where are you from?

I grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. It is at the point where Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois all meet. It is a pretty rural area with a lot of farmland, with pretty views along the river. The backcountry in Iowa is mainly cornfields, but Dubuque has many bluffs and forests near the Mississippi river.

What did you get up to as a kid?

I was pretty heavily involved in the Scouts, joining early on when I was in kindergarten. It started out as a great way to hang out with your friends, but it really built from there into something I really cared about and wanted to be more involved in. Something that really spoke to me was the elements of environmental stewardship and conservation that are woven in, things like leave no trace and leave a space better than you found it. These were perspectives that have really guided my thinking ever since.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

It was pretty nebulous early on, though I wanted to do something in science or engineering since that was what I was best at in school. Simultaneously, scouting was something that really gave me a love for the outdoors, and I wanted to do something to help the climate crisis as I learned more about it. In Iowa we don’t have a lot of natural areas, like Colorado, but that means that we really cherish the ones we do have. Growing up I learned a lot about environmental stewardship and conservation of these spaces from a young age. When I got to college, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to go into, but I knew I wanted it to incorporate these elements of protection of the environment. My preference for STEM subjects, chemistry in particular, eventually led me into chemical engineering as a major. As I found out more about the subject, I was really drawn to how chemical engineering interacts with the energy industry and, by extension, the climate. Historically that took the form of petrochemicals, but nowadays chemical engineering is much more a part of the expanding variety of renewable technologies, such as batteries and solar panels.

How would you describe your current research in five words?

Better understanding high-performing solar materials.

What led you into this area of research?

In my freshman year of undergrad I was deciding whether to pursue pre-medicine or go more into renewable energy and sustainability. I reached out to a few professors at Iowa who were engaged in renewable energy research and eventually wound up with a position working on photoelectric catalysis. That was the coolest thing I’d ever worked on, and I was hooked from there. I built and tested modular reactors, using catalysts affixed to solar cells to produce hydrogen from water. That got my foot in the door, and I have been interested in renewable energy research ever since. As I explored pursuing a PhD, I wasn’t set on continuing catalysis research, so I was interested in schools which offered a wide variety of renewable energy focused projects. This eventually led me to my current renewable energy research at ��ɫ��Ƶ. I eventually made a connection and started working with Seth Marder and Mike Toney who had an open position working between them on characterizing solar energy materials.

The class of materials which are the subject of my research are called self-assembled monolayers, essentially a single layer of molecules, so we are working on very, very small length scales. These have become a staple in the field of solar energy research as they boost performance and are a very easy material to work with. In a solar cell you have the layer that absorbs light and then sandwiching that you have two layers that push the current in one direction. These are called charge extraction layers and that is where these monolayers are used, and where my work is focused. These self-assembled monolayers are fairly new as an approach to charge extraction layers in solar cells. There are other materials that can be used as charge extraction layers, such as polymers or metal oxides, but as with any electrical phenomenon, the larger the layer, the larger the voltage loss across it as you try and transport charge. So, if you can make it really thin, such as one molecule thick, you can significantly reduce the energy lost in transport. When operating at such small length scales, it is hard to figure out what it is about these materials that makes them good at what they do. My work employs a variety of techniques to try to answer this question. Essentially, I use a lot of different versions of shining light, mainly in the form of x-rays, on a sample and investigating the signal that comes off. By looking at this we can tell whether our molecules are chemically bonded to the surface, how many molecules are on the surface, and even what orientation they are in. By experimenting with different chemistries and materials we can start to build up a more complete picture of what about them impacts solar cell performance.

You work across two research groups and have experience with a number of collaborations, say a bit more about these aspects of your work.

From a materials perspective I work as part of the Marder group, which has a wealth of expertise in the organic chemistry of semiconducting charge transfer materials. When I came in as a new graduate student, I had the option to pursue a more synthetic chemistry route with them, developing new compounds to use in solar cells. However, there was already a library of different compounds to explore within this family when I arrived. So, instead, I have been developing my expertise in characterizing and understanding this library of materials, leveraging the expertise in the Marder group on how to handle, process and optimize them. Coupling that with the expertise in the Toney group, which contains vast experience in the applied characterization to understand the structure of such materials, it has been a very interesting and fruitful collaboration.

With X-rays, you are working on energy scales that correspond to the electronic excitations within atoms – so you can probe things like the oxidation state of a given element and the energy needed to remove an electron from that system. It also gives you the ability to measure distances between atoms and how atoms and molecules are oriented in space. There is a large number of X-ray methods out there and many of them benefit greatly from having an X-ray source that you can reliably tune the energy and the intensity of. But, to get these high-quality X-rays you often need to go to a synchrotron, where I’ve had the privilege to do a large amount of my own research. These are large government facilities which have a particle accelerator at their core, with electrons in a huge ring moving very close to the speed of light. We can then use magnets to bend their trajectory, which causes the emission of light, and if they are moving fast enough, you get X-rays, which can be shone onto our samples for these experiments.

The opportunity to work with these synchrotrons has been amazing for me. Not only does it let me do experiments that would otherwise be impossible, but it has been a great opportunity to develop and learn. To get time at the facility you have to apply, and it has taught me to be a better scientific writer and given me practice at communicating my ideas effectively. It has also been humbling to work with these kinds of instruments. These are huge, billion-dollar facilities, and the chance to run experiments there is amazing.

If you had told me when I was an undergrad washing up my glassware after running reactions that I would one day be working on such a machine I wouldn’t have believed you!

It has also led to some international collaboration. Building on an existing collaboration between the Marder Group and Norbert Koch at Humboldt University in Germany, we were looking at very similar materials. Seth from a chemistry perspective and Norbert from a physics perspective. While the synchrotron work I have done is very good for looking at the orientation of molecule, it can be hard to determine whether you have a single layer, two layers, or multiple layers. This is something that the Koch group are experts at, and as part of building this international collaboration that is ongoing, I was able to go across to Germany with my materials for three months in the fall of 2024. This helped accelerate my research and I really learned a lot about a technique called XPS and other photoelectron spectroscopies done in Germany.

Berlin was a fantastic experience. I wish I had explored more of Germany, but the parts I did see where amazing. Berlin is a big city, and there is always lots to do. I was pleasantly surprised by how many parks there were in the city and how easy they were to get to. I was on the south-eastern side of the city, and there were parks that you could easily walk to. It is a really beautiful city.

What excites you about the future of solar technologies?

I am really looking forward to the manufacturing of these solar materials taking off. For solar and batteries technologies the challenges are technical and industrial as opposed to locational. Wind farms require specific locations, while solar and batteries can go almost anywhere. I am hopeful that the deployment of these types of systems will scale with their production capacity as opposed to systems like wind turbines where there is a lot more embedded in the locational permitting and transmission infrastructure. When we reach high-throughput production we will see distribution across a wide range of applications, which will open up all sorts of opportunities.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Being part of the Scouts really gave me a love of the outdoors. Growing up in Iowa there is not the same kind of parks as you find in places like Colorado, but I was able to take part in projects for stewardship and conservation. In 2016 I had the opportunity to get more involved and in the summers I spent time at the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. This is the largest adventure base in the world, something like 250 square miles in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in New Mexico. I went out as part of a program where I spent a week building trail, constructing new conservation projects on the property and then the other week you were on a trek. In some summers there would be as many as 50,000 scouts that would come through the camp, so to have any hope of it being sustainable we would be taught about the impact we were having on the land and think about ways we could mitigate that.

I enjoyed my time there so much that in a following year I went back as a staff member to lead some of the work. The first year that I went out as a staff member there was a very large wildfire before the summer got started. Since we were already trained in land conservation, the team I was part of ended up sticking around and helping do mitigation work that summer. That experience was extremely impactful for me. I went back in 2021 and led some groups and could talk about and show them the impacts of the fire. It was very tangible.

So, all of this experience has really given me a love for being outdoors and I love exploring Colorado. I enjoy skiing, mountain biking, I have recently got into road cycling, and I love hiking. Another big hobby of mine is motorcycling, which is great to pair with getting out into the mountains. I have an adventure bike and that opens up a wide range of options and spaces. I also have a love of board games, for the times when the rain is too much for being out on a bike.

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Nitrate-to-Ammonia Electroconversion at Neutral pH on Polycrystalline Vanadium Sulfide Derived from Vanadium Disulfide

Daniel Morton — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:07:23 +0000

Nitrate-to-Ammonia Electroconversion at Neutral pH on Polycrystalline Vanadium Sulfide Derived from Vanadium Disulfide Daniel Morton Mon, 06/16/2025 - 11:07

ACS APPLIED ENERGY MATERIALS, 2025, 8, 13, 9407-9418

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Identifying the Role of the TMA/H2O Atomic Layer Deposition Process on NMC811 Electrochemical Performance

Daniel Morton — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:34:35 +0000

Identifying the Role of the TMA/H2O Atomic Layer Deposition Process on NMC811 Electrochemical Performance Daniel Morton Wed, 06/11/2025 - 11:34

ACS APPLIED ENERGY MATERIALS, 2025, 8, 12, 8117-8129

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Microstructure-Dependent Sodium Storage Mechanisms in Hard Carbon Anodes

Daniel Morton — Thu, 29 May 2025 21:38:53 +0000

Microstructure-Dependent Sodium Storage Mechanisms in Hard Carbon Anodes Daniel Morton Thu, 05/29/2025 - 15:38

SMALL, 2025, 2505561

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How does an antisolvent additive affect all interfaces in aqueous Zn–MnO2 batteries?

Daniel Morton — Tue, 13 May 2025 21:31:59 +0000

How does an antisolvent additive affect all interfaces in aqueous Zn–MnO2 batteries? Daniel Morton Tue, 05/13/2025 - 15:31

JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY A, 2025, 13, 23, 17730-17739

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Electronic Structure Distortions in Chromium Chelates Impair Redox Kinetics in Flow Batteries

Daniel Morton — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:56:32 +0000

Electronic Structure Distortions in Chromium Chelates Impair Redox Kinetics in Flow Batteries Daniel Morton Wed, 04/09/2025 - 14:56

BATTERIES AND SUPERCAPS, 2025, 2500250

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Emissive Traps Lead to Asymmetric Photoluminescence Line Shape in Spheroidal CsPbBr3 Quantum Dots

Daniel Morton — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:36:09 +0000

Emissive Traps Lead to Asymmetric Photoluminescence Line Shape in Spheroidal CsPbBr3 Quantum Dots Daniel Morton Tue, 03/25/2025 - 13:36

NANO LETTERS, 2025, ASAP

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Unveiling the Mechanism of Mn Dissolution Through a Dynamic Cathode-Electrolyte Interphase on LiMn2O4

Daniel Morton — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 18:22:46 +0000

Unveiling the Mechanism of Mn Dissolution Through a Dynamic Cathode-Electrolyte Interphase on LiMn2O4 Daniel Morton Fri, 02/14/2025 - 11:22

ADVANCED ENERGY MATERIALS, 2025, 15, 22, 2404652

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SPECS 2025 Annual Meeting

Daniel Morton — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 23:49:33 +0000

SPECS 2025 Annual Meeting Daniel Morton Wed, 02/12/2025 - 16:49

Daniel Morton

SPECS EFRC

In February of 2025 RASEI hosted the 2025 SPECS Annual Meeting, bringing together researchers from across the nation to discuss recent updates and plan future research.

The Center for Soft PhotoElectroChemical Systems, or SPECS, is a US Department of Energy funded Energy Frontiers Research Center. The focus of SPECS is to understand and develop organic polymers, so called soft materials, that can be used in transporting electrons, for applications in batteries, electronics, solar energy harvesting, and thermoelectrics.

Each year members of the Center, which include researchers from seven institutions across the United States, come together to discuss recent research discoveries and brainstorm new ideas to drive the field forward. Participants at this years meeting included representatives from ��ɫ��Ƶ, NREL, The University of Arizona, Emory University, University of Kentucky, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

The two day meeting was a great opportunity for the community to build relationships across the different institutes, present their research, and develop new ideas for future directions.

02/11/2025

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