 So, I'm Mike Harris and I would like to introduce the moderator for today's panel, Professor Chang Li Yuan. You'll be happy to know that she's actually the former student of today's distinguished lecturer. So, at this point I'll turn the mic over to Professor Yuan. Thank you, Mike. And it's a great honor to moderate this panel today. And for today, we are going to focus on the future of electrochemical storage. And I was told that we should go through the agenda very first, very quickly. So, what we are going to do is we'll have a brief overview of electrochemical storage. Then I'll introduce you to our distinguished panelists here. And then we'll have panel discussion. And then we'll open the forum to everyone here. So, we'll take any questions that you may have regarding electrochemical storage. So, we'll start by providing you my overview of electrochemical storage by providing you a stack of pictures. So, when we think about electrochemical storage, we think about fancy cars that Tesla produced. We think about the grids that store energy that actually power our house. And we use them on daily basis, including smartphones. And it's very popular used in the health industry. All those tiny machines. So, the machine that you are looking at is actually a pacemaker that gets implanted in people's heart. And there are those batteries that we buy from grocery stores. So, this is my overview of electrochemical storage. And we know we are always complaining how often we need to charge our cell phone. So, that's why we gather this panel together. So, we can get the scientific perspective of how we can get more powerful electrochemical storage units. So, we'll start by introducing our panelists. So, you've already heard from Mike. So, we have Professor Lyndon Archer here from Cornell. And on my right-hand side, we have Professor Edwin Garcia from Material Science and Professor Amy McCormick from Mechanical Engineering. Professor Vilas Paul from Chemical Engineering. And Professor Koji Zhao from Mechanical Engineering. And we leave the best to the last. We have Dr. James Fleetwood from the Battery Innovation Center here at Indianapolis. So, we're going to start our panel by having Edwin introduce his current research. Okay. Thank you. I guess to introduce myself, I did my undergraduate in the University of Mexico in Mexico. I got that degree of physics. Then I went to MIT to get my master's and my PhD in Material Science. There I worked with Craig Carter. And I also chatted briefly with Yanming Chang on aspects of rechargeable batteries as well. My work was mostly on the modeling and simulation of micro-structurally complex materials with electrical fields. Then I had the opportunity to work on the development of software, opens our software at NIST. And then I was very lucky to get hired at Purdue where I became an assistant and associate and now a full professor. Is that a green one? There you go. Okay. So, this is just a slide summarizing the people actually doing the work in my group. All doctoral students really are working on different aspects, not only of rechargeable batteries, but in general, we have a knack for micro-structure evolution, for phase transformations, for kinetics and thermodynamics. And the two post-doctoral researchers really help also move this forward. I do have to always thank the support of the people that fund me. These are my current areas of research. At the bottom, you can see one big project that I have is kinetics of flash sintering, where basically you have ions and complex granular materials, how charge is going to it. That's what those yellow networks that you see there, the micro-structure evolution of ferroelectrics, some work of grain growth. But you can see the top, basically the top half of this slide corresponds to trying to understand the micro-structural designs of battery materials, basically how different types of granular structures impact the performance and degradation of rechargeable batteries. That's mostly what I do. I even gave my own take on dendrite growth, which I was very excited to hear today in today's presentation. So that's me. Oh, yes, I forgot about that completely. Fundamentally, what we do in my group is try to bring what happens at the most fundamental length scale and bring it up from, say, the particle level, the mesoscale level to see what happens when you have multiple particles brought together, how that leads to micro-structural properties, such as tortuosity, transport properties. And when you have many of them that becomes intractable to spatially resolve them, then we start looking at the sample level where we have to account for tortuosities, areas densities, and then all that variability, how it impacts all the weight up to the cell module, and including the real randomness and complexity behavior that occurs in the in-road. You can see that little plot that you see on the top. That's the input of what you should put actually on a real battery, where you have currents with all these complex shapes. Every single time you hit a break on an electric vehicle or you're trying to recharge it on the fly, those should be incorporated. And you would have to include all the single crystal effects in order to be able to predict the performance and degradation. And I put that as the challenges that my group faces as we go up. And I think that's finally it. Thanks. I'm Amy Marcinay, and I'm an associate professor here at Purdue. A little bit about my background is up there, but I did my master's and my PhD at Stanford on nanoscale heat transfer. And then I spent a year at MIT working as a postdoc on thermal transport and more, I would say, soft materials. After that, I started here as an assistant professor, and now I'm tenured. And my lab is the Marcinay Thermal and Energy Conversion Lab. So we work in a broad space on heat transfer problems, energy storage problems, et cetera. And I have a wide number of projects. Today, I'll just talk a little bit about our work in motivation for work on electrochemical energy storage. So here's a brief snapshot of some of my grad students. They're the ones who do the hard work in the lab. And here's my take. I think I have a few orders of magnitude more in length scales on my chart here. But we work at trying to analyze the heat transfer in electrochemical systems across the length scales. And so at the micro nanoscale, we focus on how the particles and grains impact the thermal transport and how we can affect the structure of the electrodes through the processing steps. So there's an example there of a shear cell where we can control shearing of granular particles similar to how electrodes are made and try to understand the thermal transport through this porous structure. At the mesoscale, there's, say, from a few microns to tens to hundreds of microns, we work on thermal property analysis, trying to characterize the thermal conductivity and the heat generation within the electrodes of batteries. So I show one example of a measurement technique that we've developed to characterize the thermal conductivity or the effective thermal conductivity of individual electrode layers. And we were one of the first groups to actually directly measure the thermal interface resistance between layers of the battery stack and especially between the battery stack and the case, which was important for a NASA application. And then at the macro scale, we really want to understand how these systems integrate into systems like electric vehicles and understand how you get heat out of these systems. So we do some thermal performance analysis of cells during operation, and then we hope to integrate those results into models of performance. So I'll pass it on then. Thank you. Good afternoon. I am Velazfol, faculty of chemical engineering. I joined here in 2014, January. I am from Pune University. I did my two master's, master of science and master of philosophy degrees in chemistry from Pune University, which is also called as Oscar of the East. Then I moved to Israel, where I did my PhD under Professor Doran Arbok and Gadan Ken. And as everybody knows, Doran Arbok is the best electrochemist in the world. He really dig down the electrochemistry very well. Then I did postdoc in a solar cell, a desensitized solar cell with Professor Arizaban from the same university back in 2005 and 2006. Then I moved to Argonne National Lab as a director, director's postdoctoral fellow. Followed by that, I was an assistant material scientist for a year and then became a material scientist. And I worked with Michael Thakre, who is also a pioneer in batteries, typically cathode science and technology. And then I joined Purdue. This is my group in 2019 summer. Now there are more student joined to my group very recently. So we do work on a variety of batteries, such as lithium, potassium, sodium. As you know that Elon Musk is busy in making the gigafactory and putting the batteries everywhere in the cars. But my small group is busy actually making very small batteries and putting in the small toy cars that can run my son's toy. Last year we played that in the snow. This year there is no snow so we couldn't play. But we do take help of battery innovation center with James and he make a outsell for us. At some point we are dreaming that our battery should be sitting in all your devices, including cell phone and electric vehicles. So that's the objective of our pubs, Purdue University battery systems. So as you know that there are four or five unique challenges that we have to tackle and that can help you to generate some of the questions. So batteries are very expensive. Still they are expensive. We want to make them inexpensive. So we have to go with earth abundant and inexpensive materials from the periodic table. Safety is a paramount and that is the core of my lab, thermal safety, mechanical safety, vibrational safety kind of aspects. We do work routinely for all the electrochemisties one can develop. Battery life is typically very small and that is due to the electrochemistry that we were hearing today. Electrolyte is highly corrosive. So typically battery life is three to five years. We want to have them for 15 years. Battery also does not like very low or high temperature. They are like human beings. They are preferring to stay in the room temperature because of the electrolyte that boils at high temperature and freezes at low temperature. And now we are around 7.8 billion people on earth and we already have 15 billion batteries with us and we do not know how to recycle them. So we are also having another new challenge how to recycle batteries and we have to tackle all those problems together in order to make our future better. Otherwise it looks like a broken glass. Now my lab works on a variety of things. We do work on lithium and traditional electrochemistry that will be there, that is there. Lithium is abundant. Lithium is not abundant. It is expensive but lithium ion batteries will be there forever. Next generation batteries are sodium ion batteries, potassium ion batteries and lithium metal batteries like lithium sulphur that can give you three to five times higher energy density but they come with their own problems. So typically all of them what we do is try to explore new materials but beyond that are they safe? That is the fundamental question we are trying to dig down. With that I will pass it to Kezi Greenbutt. Thank you. So I'm Keji Jha. I'm an assistant professor of mechanical engineering here. I got my bachelor from Shenzhen University at China and then I went to Harvard for a master and a PhD degree and after that after spending two years as opposed to MIT and then joined Purdue mechanical engineering. So my research is mainly on mechanics and materials and I'm working on two types of materials. One is a redux actual materials mainly on battery materials and their type of material is a polymeric material, soft material and in terms of battery materials we developed operand experiments to monitor the mechanical behavior of battery materials during operation of the batteries and also develop theories and atomism relations to understand how the mechanics and chemistry are coupled together and in terms of polymer materials we are working on organic semiconductors and electrochromics. So just in the context of energy storage for the battery materials we have two basic research questions to answer. One is how do electrochemical process such as ion transport, charge distribution and interfacial reaction, phase transformation, how those elements of electrochemical process induce the mechanics of the battery materials and second of all is how do the mechanical stresses and mechanical degradation influence the electrical performance such as the capacity and voltage response and and the cyclic efficiency of the battery materials. So those are the two basic research questions we're trying to answer and in terms of the experiments one of the highlights of the experiment is that we developed operand experiments, tried to monitor the mechanical behavior of the materials during the charging and discharging process of batteries and also through understanding the mechanics we're trying to understand the chemistry like how what is the kinetic limiting process for battery materials and one highlight for the theoretical part is that we try to develop the computational modeling tools to understand the mechanics failure and also the battery performance and see how they couple together so that's pretty much about my research on batteries. All right, I'm James Fleetwood, a PhD out of Purdue actually as well as bachelor's and now I'm back again so I guess I must like this place. Since then I've been at the Battery Innovation Center. I'll have a little bit more on the next slide about what the BIC is all about but the core of what the BIC does and what I do is really more of the integration of what everyone else here on the panel learned. You know there's so much good science already out there so much more to learn but a lot of what I do is catch the industry up with what everyone here is doing and so I end up working with working at more of a system level and integrating components. So with that I've worked with just about every chemistry and component at this point so we're talking high nickel intercalation cathodes, the lithium sulfur chemistry a lot, lithium air which is extra challenging. On the anodes that's actually where the majority of the work has probably been carbon series particularly we're talking silicon but anything in the carbon series composites there are particularly carbon composites and then name them ophology my favorites are rods but all of the above on that one. Electrolytes again typically we're talking about working at various additive structures and how to form better SEIs, more robust SEIs, high voltage stable SEIs, room temperature ionic liquids solid electrolytes being mostly polymer and sulfide where polymer is doesn't mean literally just polymer and again since we're more of an integrator what I work on is more the strategies are putting these together so that's often you know there's often a lot of science on how every individual component behaves but not necessarily how they interact with each other particularly in a high performance environment and that largely comes down to inefficient control which is why I gave it a nice underline on the bullet points here otherwise you're talking about you know electron lithium ion transport balance you know it's almost you know not often a big focus but in some ways it's almost like your fuel-air mixture in an engine if these things aren't balanced it actually can lead to a lot of other problems and with that comes you combine the two of those and you have why you need surface protection methods particularly for high voltage cathodes or that we were talking about SEI protection on the anode another big area which does get more into the fundamental research side would be the secondary lithium sources that's added components that are pre-lithiated pre-lithiating electrodes electrolytically or having some sort of phase decomposition compound that releases lithium into the other compounds like the the lmr nmc system where you have an li2 mn03 structure that breaks down but releases lithium and compensates for the colombic efficiency and gives you mitigating strategies to get high performance for moderate cycle life beyond that it's all about rheological control to then develop specific microstructures or hetero structures which ties back into manufacturing processes oftentimes i'm trying to translate say someone did chemical vapor deposition to create a battery and it was amazing but i have to make it cheap so i use have to use tape casting and i have to figure out a way to make a slurry solidify in a way that somehow approximates vapor deposition which is also not easy beyond that we're just talking about really any other component largely those are about getting efficient getting things more efficient thinner lighter current collectors separators binders again a little bit more interesting where you're talking about not just sort of molecular weight control or something like that but functionalized polymers or block copolymers are getting pretty exciting for me on the conversion chemistries that's one where i'll save that for the one of the questions actually on the follow up um and generally conductive additives the uh key point there one would probably be the term dispersed nanocarbons of fullerene so carbon nanotubes of graphene finding strategies to back to the microstructural design and the cost side to make a cost effective battery with carbon nanotubes in it you need like a quarter weight percent or half a weight percent of carbon nanotubes if you could put all you wanted in there you could create a great battery but for cost you needed to be a very small amount and if you only have a quarter weight percent you need to put it exactly where it's supposed to be in order to have that impact beyond that much more on the practical side dabbling in the modeling here but the thermal transport optimization of ev pack design that's one area that is way way beyond uh behind the science there are the evs on the road today are our um thermal behavior and transport was a second thought or a third thought in in many cases in the case of tesla they released their first electric vehicles without even doing anything about thermal transport and now people are doing some um but there's still a lot of open open area there i'll talk about uh so taking a step back just talking about the bick and what the role is i may have alluded to it a little bit in my work um but it really is we're really supposed to be a bridge between universities and academia and industry or department of defense department of energy um we're a very collaborative entity and so a lot of the reason i've worked with so many different projects is that um we're almost like a user facility in some sense you know individual research groups or startup companies bring their individual material that they created to the bick i pull it together with other people's advances and we create integrated systems um and then we don't hold intellectual property we're protect intellectual property and it's again it's a way of innovating faster one of the gaps between all the science we have and the actual industry we have is everyone being afraid that their ideas are going to be stolen if they work with other people you know if you go back a hundred years which maybe is why we have this problem teslan edison um people used to work together a great deal more and share information very openly and that kind of has pulled back and stopped and the bick is sort of an initiative to get us back to where we were back to that fast innovation that we used to have um and to do that we offer a broad set of capabilities again advanced cell manufacturing prototyping we have about 2000 square feet of less than one percent humidity dry room if you want to work with raw lithium metal you need a very dry place and we can make cells from coin cells to pouch cells 18650s pretty much you name it we can build it from scratch and then we can do any sort of test on that cell all the way up to megawatt hour systems just yesterday i don't think i can name the company but we blew up a electric vehicle pack it was exciting um usually you don't intend for it to blow up but you have to know what will happen when it does in order to be safe beyond that again applied research and consulting kind of across the board in the industry when people have helped set up electrochemistry labs in the us or manufacturing facilities um so we kind of consult it kind of across the board we're a network entity so when we i don't have all these answers but i know the people who have the answers like vlas for instance and i'll refer um and connect again sort of this idea of sharing information of networking together of accelerating this innovation and again getting all this great science out into practical use which we're so behind on uh with that okay so wow fencing 18 work let's give a quick applause to all the panelists for their wonderful scientific achievement and we'll start our first panel discussion question so the common word that you have heard a lot today from every single panelist are challenges so what is the major technical challenge from your perspective in electrochemical storage nowadays and what do you perceive as the best strategy to address those challenges so we'll start with our distinguished lecturer today so what do you think so well first of all thanks for organizing this panel this is different and it is good to learn about all the nice work that's going on at Purdue so the um the major challenges from my perspective come in essentially three bins right so one bin is cost we have to be able to make batteries that are cheaper more accessible the second bin is safety we have to make batteries and battery systems that are safe at scale and to give you a perspective on this it's you know it's okay if one ev blows up but it's not okay if you know five blow up and it's certainly not if they start blowing up in a chain reaction and so i think this question of safety is likely to become even more important as the number density of ev sander road becomes important and i guess the third aspect i think is going to be manufacturing i think the i would argue that the barrier to implementation of some of the best ideas in science that you hear about isn't really that we don't know how to integrate them into cells but we don't know how to manufacture them at reasonable cost in other words pretty much every battery manufacturing operation is a unique entity and we need to learn how to leverage things like semiconductor fabs and that sort of processing to do battery processing at scale to be able to you know have faster pathways for adoption of some of the cool things that are coming out in research thank you let's hear from thank you i completely agree with what you're saying i would i would add to that that the that challenges that you refer to by themselves have their own challenges mostly because in in order for example to understand the the science behind improving the safety of the batteries one has to be able to have the experimental information both at the macro scale and at the microscopic scale right at the macroscopic scale even though as james was alluding that there's a lot of a fear of sharing data associated to the particular particular intellectual property all scientists are in great need of having the experimental data both macroscopically and microscopically macroscopically for example if you look at the published literature maybe you can find statistics on 150 cells right and that barely makes it in order to be able to understand what happens at the macro level and at the macro structural level or even mesoscopic level even i mean even further down being able to understand how the batteries behave and having reliable data that we can then use to propagate into models and theories and designs i think the industry has moved ahead so fast that left all the all that basic science behind i mean and that just from gathering the data i mean from from where i stand and in order to develop theories and models to describe it these days for example to predict the degradation the failure of a cell what is done the state of the art of of being able to predict the degradation of a battery you you do have an average model and from that average model you predict the degradation of the cell at most for say three months right and your code will run for two weeks and then from there you extrapolate for two years and then try to make a conclusion based on that i think everyone in this room would agree that you cannot extrapolate the equivalent of three months to two years or five years because there's a lot of stuff happening in the in the in under road conditions that are actually impacting on the degradation of that cell and as as a user you don't want to use a cell that you fear or may fear that will fail in a catastrophic way so in that perspective i think those are the two at least two challenges that they just the challenge of addressing safety and we do one save batteries need to be addressed anyway i'll pick that up from there first on the manufacturing point which i want to support as strong in as strong words as i can and i want to give an example a little bit more explicitly so we've been dropping the cost dramatically in cells cell cost impact costs in recent years which is great although really the reason is largely because of how poorly we were making them so there's so much room for improvement the case is still there in fact my biggest complaint about how we manufacture today as much as i would love to even develop entirely new manufacturing processes is that it's batch processing which is really odd for the year that we're in people have invented the continuous manufacturing process pieces applied it to other industries comically enough a lot of the industry that we replaced had the continuous those back story on role-the-roll manufacturing magnetic tape disks and kodak film those when those became obsolete we had all this leftover equipment and we started applying it to batteries and then we started just like well let's simplify it and let's just keep doing it that way and let's not change things so we don't understand what those changes will do and if you do a continuous is the biggest argument i hear is if you do continuous manufacturing how are you going to track all those bad sales we're always making you know we have to know when we're each batch because we have to throw entire batches out all the time we have to have a b c d and f cells you know you make a few hundred liters of slurry and the slurry may be stable the entire time but it's not the same throughout that time you make a big roll of electrode you coat one side then you coat the other side and now side one was dried a little differently than side two you counter them in a fully dry state you put them on these giant multi hundred meter rolls and you try to vacuum dry them on these rolls and so the outside ends up being more dried than the inside the edges end up more dried than the inside it's all inconsistency and this is when i would go back to an analogy of corrosion you know batteries function very similarly to corrosion where the path of least resistance kills them um any any variation in a cell that's the worst thing in the cell we don't need to necessarily invent new chemistries or or vast improvements to the fundamentals we just need to make more uniform and consistent cells and that's one of these things continuous manufacturing does um and it also of course ultimately makes it cheaper as well uh so that's that's what i'm a big proponent of and again the equipment basically exists we no factory in the world has currently installed an entire continuous manufacturing line beyond that i would say if i went on the more fundamentals it's probably electrolyte electrode interface particularly sei formation even outside of lithium metal cells you know i don't really like it when everyone describes the system as a phase mosaic that doesn't sound very explicit to me um with that i might give the others a chance to talk okay dr mcconi thanks from from my perspective we're trying to improve the performance of batteries but we can't sacrifice the safety and reliability and a lot of the safety and reliability challenges that have come up have been thermal perspective or thermal driven and as uh james mentioned earlier uh thermal has often been in the backseat so i think one of the major technical challenges is getting thermal engineers into the the driver's seat let's say and uh integrating thermal design into the design of batteries and so if you look at cylindrical cells in particular and show it to anybody who studies heat transfer that geometry is one of the worst for dissipating heat uh so uh i think we radically need to think about is there a different geometry let alone materials and chemistries that could improve the performance of these batteries okay i will take a different spin here so we heard the fundamental problems there are major five problems that i elaborated and there is applied problem but more than that technologically we are not making our own batteries even today tesla is making but the technology is panasonic so the reason is the materials where are the materials first up on lithium cobalt oxide is a traditional cathode we do not have enough cobalt now cobalt price is going up lithium price is also going up there are only few mountains left in bolivia and chile that has lithium source and half of the lithium whatever they produce china already bought it so we have limitations so that is a technological problem to all electrochemical energy storage devices we will have lithium ion batteries but certainly we will have to go beyond that in order to store all our renewable energy at some point uh so lithium ion battery has challenges similarly other electrochemistries have challenges but major problem is rely on the material science and chemistry where is the material what are the materials and then the problem comes it is thermally safe unsafe how much energy you can dissipate or not but the problem lies on materials i might just add one point about the challenges significant challenge regarding our battery materials in addition to the three pillars safety cost and manufacturing that it's i think it's one another significant challenge is a very difficult to push the frontier of the performance of the battery because the battery is a truly complex system and we we often joke that when we saw one problem in battery you often create 10 more problems in batteries i think it comes from the complexity in two sense one is it's a really complex internal mature system it's it contains hard materials and software materials and liquid materials and interfaces and when you innovate one type one part of the materials and then you need to have the same innovation of the system so this is really a system engine a system engineering so if we think about the Morse law for computer chips the innovation for batteries are far far below the innovation pace for the computer chips and there's challenges comes from the complexity of the science behind it's i i would say that battery is a truly multi-skill system from from down to the atomist skill micro-skilled to the micro-skill and also it's a multi-physics system it comes from the chemistry the physics materials and mechanics more recently so for example i'm working on mechanics and materials and we're particularly concerned about the mechanical degradation there was a fracture and debounding and fatigue of the battery materials as professor Garcia commented that this mechanical degradation has become a limiting factor for like a solid state of hydrogen materials and for this high capacity materials and how to understand if we want to push forward those high engine state battery materials and mechanical degradation will become a really issue a bottleneck issue so that's my comment well now we have heard all about the challenges as an engineer what we want to do next is we want to come up with solutions so this leads to the next question that i want to ask all the panelists so we have engineers working different sectors industry sector academic sector or someone like doc fluid who works to connect us so how can advances in fundamental science can contribute to the design of next generation electrochemical energy storage system so we have already heard an example from the wonderful talk from dr archer today so and i want to have the panelists share their openings um about this particular questions it will actually start with dr fluid so he can tell us what is his view from the other side of the fence oh great great um i won't dig more into the interfacial stuff because admittedly that was top on the list um i would say beyond that um a few more phase diagrams would be nice in terms of the complexity of the system i'm asking for quaternary plus phase diagrams from you could you could you get me that for every structure of manganese oxide for instance that can that can exist and every substitution possible that would be great um that's maybe asking a lot i think there still is some on the on the fundamental materials that aren't there um and the some of the formation mechanisms i think another area would say that's maybe more of a methodology on the fundamental science is going back to the complexity of the system oftentimes in order to get um in order to get a result the system is simplified so much that you can still learn from it it's still it still gives you a step but sometimes it's maybe oversimplified as you actually gave a good example of and with that you know my greatest complaint is usually when we talk about electrode formulations that people use in a lot of journal articles like you see a lot of by weight electrode formulations which is already a problem when you go into the lab and you mix something and it's a solid yeah you weigh mass but when you talk about the function of the electrode the mass does not really have much relevancy and so it's already saying well why are we standardizing to 801010 or 8955 it doesn't doesn't make a lot of sense to me um the other side of that is you think of a one to one comparison you're saying well i took five materials and i analyzed i characterize them in this way and every one of them was 95 five because that's one to one and oftentimes i've you know when i go back and i try and repeat someone's result and i look through it and like yeah i got that result uh that formula is best for that material the result wasn't that result you found an optimized formula for one material that happened to be 95 five or closer to 95 five another one might have been 91 4 5 you know a little little tiny change it goes back to this idea of it being a system and again i sometimes use it as a rough analogy of thinking of an engine just because i usually feel like people understand engines a little bit more where um you know the chemistry side might be saying it's a gas engine or a diesel engine but the exact you know the exact fuel to air mixture the size of and length of crank arms and everything even though we don't think of a battery as a having moving parts it is extremely dynamic as we kind of saw with some of your presentation there are a lot of moving parts they're just microscopic or nanoscopic and so there you still have to kind of design it like a machine uh back to the chemistry example if you try to do a one-to-one gasoline to diesel comparison with one engine well only one of them might work and you're not going to really find out what you need and so that would be some of my complaints there okay so next generation electrochemical energy storage devices you might have heard that uh we need to put more than one electron into the system lithium ion lithium plus only one lithium shuttles back and forth we have to find two or three multivalent electrons which can be shuttled back and forth so magnesium chemistry can do that mg2 plus calcium can do that but there is a problem everywhere the anode is a problem cathode is a problem electrolyte nobody knows what can work uh also the cost and other benefits we will we will have to look at so typically the next generation batteries that we are thinking to come to the market could be sodium ion technology sodium is abundant and inexpensive however the problems lies on sodium is completely different acl air formation and shuttling of sodium into uh amorphous carbon versus gravity carbon is totally different so we cannot just mimic the chemistry of lithium ion and put it on the sodium ion and say that it works so all the fundamentals that we are trying to dig down with all advanced techniques that we have today advanced photon source variety of x-rays x-ups technology or in c2tm and many others that is the way we are trying to dig down the fundamentals how that next generation batteries are going to come to us and what are the problems so there are many problems then solution for the next generation batteries as you know uh last 30 years we did not progress too much sony was the first company to bring the batteries to us typically lithium ion batteries 1991 and until now from that time we did not progress too much we might have increased the capacity by 50 percent or so but not that more than that so in order to go to next generation batteries such as lithium cell for system where two lithium can be connected to cell for li2s chemistry we will have the battery three times much more energy dense but the problem everybody was saying that nobody knows the safety aspect our group is the first one we are digging down how safe those batteries are and we had very good discussion today actually we are making safer batteries than we have today in your cell phone using multivalent system where we can store more energy and still make the batteries safer so there are pros and cons we will need five to ten more years I found very interesting your comment about the the coronary phase diagram uh mostly because I I feel from my side of the fence I feel the same way about asking to the industrial part of the fence right as to hey you have any data so I can figure out the coronary phase diagram so I think I think to me the the biggest issue is in closing the gap between what the the the industrial side may have and what the academic side may have to me that that's one one issue right and they just say let's just pretend for a second that I happen to have that coronary phase diagram then what do I do with it right because if I have the fanciest chemistry in the world that in in my benchmark laboratory or in my computer it's telling me that this is going to be the next big thing in rechargeable battery technology I still need to figure out the science from scaling that up okay which and then processing becomes a huge deal right so that they that power and energy density doesn't get diluted as I go up from the smallest length scale all the way to the to the new electric vehicle okay and to me that's really the the the biggest issue on being able to scale that up right to to scale it up in a consistent way well I not only account for the average response of the cell but to the error bar because one one single cell will give me one voltage as a function of time if I look at tens of thousands of cells that will give me a whole distribution and if I am on they just pretend for a second that I'm trying to sell an electric vehicle on a lot I have to convince the buyer that that particular cell is going to be worth the money of the person that's trying to beat to buy it right that actually that person that is going to buy that electric vehicle he will save money from using that car and I think that science is not there yet and I think if we develop that fundamental science you know from atoms all the way to the to the lot I think that I think that would be a huge deal okay that and I'll just echo those sentiments about my thoughts for that we need to break down the barriers both on campus and academia between different research areas and then also between academia and industry I was going to point out and it has been already we often do small-scale experiments in the lab and we need to gain the trust of the industry partners to get those things implemented in next generation systems I'm only a hundred miles away just come on by yeah sure I I think it's there's no doubt that the fundamental science is a driving force for the technology I want to add there decided to kind of comment that I think this boundary technology or energy story technology actually brings tremendous opportunity for academia as we are right so it's there are many questions we we never thought about actually for example in the chemistry feud there is a very little consideration or theoretical framework on how to consider how the stress regulated the chemical process like iron transport and the charge transfer and phase transformation and similarly for the mechanics field there's not much work have been done how to consider the chemical drying forces into how those chemical processes driving driven the mechanical degradation mechanical failure doing so much here so I think one side is how we use this the fundamental science to drive the technology development on the other side is probably we can take advantage of this technology to consider the new frontier or to you to branch or new science at this interface of physics and chemistry and mechanics yeah so so I'll just say two things a lot of really good points have already been made but so we and I want to step back a little bit and just point out that the rechargeable battery won the Nobel Prize last year for a good reason it is an exceptional device and so if you listen to the discussion up here you might think that it's a mediocre technology but I challenge you to find any other closed system closed system that can operate for three years continuously without fail and retain 80 plus percent of its initial energy it is just remarkable and I challenge you further to think of this the all of the electrolytes that are in current use today are reductively unstable at the potentials of the anode inside this battery that I just described this closed system so I think that the reason why the lithium ion technology this generation has been so resilient is that it's just so exceptional in terms of its ability to retain retain charge and prevent degradation over extended periods of time that I'm not aware of any other chemical system that has that sort of durability over time now when I think of the next generation so one of the things that has influenced me a lot is that I started a company about seven or eight years ago out of technology that came out of my group and one of the thing I learned is that the next generation is actually not decided by any of us but decided by the market that ultimately the next generation is set by the things people are willing to pay for at the cost that you're willing to make it and when I look at what the future looks like I see basically two things as the drivers for that adoption I see the emergence of autonomous robotics that absolutely are going to need batteries and they're likely not going to be the ones that we're using today in part because as I started with those technologies will be interfacing directly with humans and so the room for error in terms of safety is going to be zero and insurability is going to be a pretty substantial factor in terms of their acceptance and so thinking about systems that are intrinsically safe I think solid state is one of the things that people have essentially converged on because of the fact that there's no volatiles and so fail is likely safe and so I think breakthroughs in terms of being able to understand transport and solids being able to maintain this high durability over time in solids it's going to be important I think of the other driver and the other driver is just the tremendous cost reductions we've seen in energy generation from renewable technologies now that sector has no patience for high cost if you cannot get the cost of whatever the next generation technology is below two cents a kilowatt hour no one cares what it is and I think because a pretty substantial part of getting to that target is really about how long you are mortised the acquisition cost it means that you have to develop systems that are sort of quasi open and so this is where things like the flow batteries and so forth that you may have heard about I believe Excel because these systems allow us to essentially do what the lithium ion technology is able to do but in an open format that allows us to fix errors as the system progresses in time there is I know my moderator wants me to stop but but I'll make one last observation I think there's another scale of opportunity and that scale of opportunity I think comes from the world of data sciences where we now have capabilities to collect tons and tons of data and to basically reduce the data into kind of parsimonious minimalistic analytical forms that allow us to use cheaper controllers and so I think a battery future in which we begin to think of the cells as belonging in a pack where all of the members of the pack don't have to do the same thing don't have to be the same but they can be designed to excel at individual things and we utilize the tools of data science and systems control to integrate function over that pack I think that to me looks like a future that might be affordable that can meet the needs of the new technology now I think it's a good time for us to open the forum of discussion to all of the audience I'm sure we have questions here okay so we'll start with you I would be interested in knowing the perspective or views on recycling of the batteries so he's my student you should take the question well this is um so I sit on the board of I think the only company in the U.S. that recycles lithium ion batteries and I kind of urge you to think about this upwards of 97% of the lead that is used in your car lead acid battery was in another battery in a previous lifetime and so we kind of know how to do this and to maintain cost in the context of lead acid batteries and why do we know how to do it so well we know to do it well because there's a penalty on it lead is dangerous toxic and so forth and so recycling it is actually a requirement the um I think a similar paradigm has to develop and it's a very interesting paradigm because you hear lots of discussion about you know let's remove cobalt because we have a low supply or the U.S. market um it's it's expensive but if you think about that from the perspective of a recycler cobalt is actually the most valuable part of the battery if you remove it what is the incentive to recycle that battery and so my view is that to um to to make progress we've got to now integrate recyclability in the cost factors of the battery we have to integrate the so-called lifecycle cost when we decide which technologies have to proceed I can say a lot more but I'll stop there I just want to add to to what you just said uh last time I checked in the world there are really two plants that are recycling batteries one is in Detroit and the other one is in Barcelona the rest of the batteries if you want to recycle them first you burn them in in this big open field in Africa and then from there you move it around right that by itself at least to me it I found that an outrage that that's what that's what's happening now I don't know and I don't know if it's still happening but as lithium resources as as Belas pointed out that the amount the number of mines are limited and they're being depleted the next mining field is going to be the it's going to be the trash can right and I think you will find probably more lithium in a battery that you toss than than in a in a depleted mine and I think in that sense even if we remove I think that even if we remove cobalt I think they're going to be a lot of a how do they call them a trashed divers you know the people that actually go and look yeah there will be a lot of professional dumpster divers trying to get the lithium out so can I yeah so I think that um you know the nice thing about and someone mentioned this already the interesting thing about batteries and storage from my perspective is how quickly you can transfer fundamental knowledge into a device and you can learn relatively quickly whether your ideas are good or bad and I in chemical engineering that's usually hard to make an innovation and evaluate it in a device that actually is morphologically the same as the real thing I mean in detail it may be different and so that's important but the other element is how things are coupled and so you make an interesting point about trash divers but actually trash diving for batteries is actually fundamentally unsafe and unsafe from the personal perspective I agree yeah and so so one of the the huge challenges really is going to come from you know how to be recycled batteries right the the process of recycling typically typically begins with crushing the cell crushing is a short if the battery shorts in a fully charged state it's a fire hazard if you're recycling this by low skilled workers who are trash divers it's a problem and so coming up with some framework that um anticipates the full life of batteries anticipates the need to extend the life of the materials perhaps by recycling I think is one of the grand challenge questions how do we do it as a society without being too interventionalists in terms of you know what EVs and so forth end up using I just want to add to what you just said you're absolutely right I should have mentioned that too and one of the biggest issues there on recycling batteries as compared to solar panels that you have already standards and the sizes and shapes in batteries we don't have those standards right and and that will make her for a robot to come and start this assembling a battery very difficult right and probably a the development of artificial intelligence that allows for a robot to to manipulate a cell and from there figure out what to do with it as to how to peel the different layers and toss them into different buckets I think that's an interesting already mechanical engineering problem right so yeah I would like to add slightly different view on that where we are talking about recycling there is a fire hazard and you might have seen the batteries are on fire tesla was on fire so batteries has electrolyte it has a salt li pc li pf6 lithium hexaflora phosphate with electrolyte when it is on fire it forms hydrofluoric acid hf and hf is highly highly corrosive to our lungs so whenever you see something is on fire like batteries you should not go on taking the video you should really run away from that the reason is your life could be on danger and electric vehicle has eight to nine thousand batteries total amount of hf generated will be in kilograms might be and that much if you can inhale or if you are nearby it could impact today or tomorrow or at some point it could be really dangerous that actually is one of my fear of chronic concern for like firefighters and so forth is typically the amount of hf is ppm less than 10 so it's unlikely to kill you unless the carbon dioxide is going to kill you so typically the carbon dioxide will kill you first in any given instance not that that's a plus but the chronic effect of hf is very questionable especially since one of its other effects is to deplete the protection around your neurons and so it's the one acid that typically doesn't physically burn you as a sense until it's way way too late so that's pretty scary there's one more point I know we're probably going to go on but I will say that we're kind of on a cusp of getting better on recycling one of the challenges has been in the past we were much more recycling individual cells where there's no knowledge about the history of that cell even what the chemistry in that cell is and so most manufacturing most remanufacturing is yeah you grind it all up you assume there's kind of a blend of lco and nmc and so forth and it's just not quite as good as it used to be if you have ev companies you have they plan for second life so second life is not recycling it's reusing it in like a grid storage application or refreshing the electrolyte or lithium supply and reusing it and then it's once it goes into manufacturing imagine a million electric vehicles with the same chemistry being recycled that's easier to do well let's make sure that we definitely recycle our batteries so with this we'll conclude our panel today let's thank all our panelists for a wonderful discussion before we end the day let's give a big applause to all the engineering supporting staff because they are the only hero for making this event happen thank you all for participating