Research
A battery is only as good as its weakest component, and in practice the weak point is usually a material. Our main focus is sodium-ion batteries. They promise cheaper and more sustainable energy storage, but they need materials designed for sodium rather than borrowed from lithium.
For electrodes, we make oxides of niobium, tungsten, vanadium, tantalum and molybdenum, using polyoxometalates as molecular building blocks, and we make hard carbon anodes from boreal forest biomass. For the rest of the cell, we develop glass-ceramic solid electrolytes as a safer alternative to flammable liquid electrolytes, and separators made from cellulose and electrospun fibres.
A recurring question is how these materials behave in the cold, where battery performance often drops sharply, which matters a lot this far north. In the project Batteries for the North, we are developing cathode, anode and separator materials for sodium-ion cells that work in a cold climate.
Our one lithium project runs the other way. Together with Toyota Motor Europe, we are developing water-based methods for recovering components directly from spent lithium-ion batteries.
We also maintain ECCE, the Extensible Computational Chemistry Environment. It’s a free graphical interface for setting up, running and analysing calculations in ORCA, Gaussian, NWChem, MOPAC and other codes. If you’ve ever wished quantum chemistry came with buttons, have a look.