Interdisciplinary project explores organic materials for sustainable battery production

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Researchers at Ohio State are using state-of-the-art active machine learning methods to accelerate the discovery of new battery materials based on abundant elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur, which can provide a more economical and sustainable route to renewable energy storage.

“The ability to store renewable energy in a scalable, profitable and environmentally benign manner would be a major step in the direction of global net-zero carbon emissions,” says Joel Paulson, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a Sustainability Institute core faculty member.

Joel Paulson
Paulson

Lithium-ion batteries, touted for their reliability and high energy density, are one of the leading electrochemical energy storage systems and have substantially advanced the progress of modern electronics. However, the production of conventional lithium-ion batteries heavily relies on finite and unsustainably sourced transition metals, such as cobalt and nickel. If this dependence continues, the environmental impact of these batteries will inevitably restrict their adoption as electrochemical energy storage media on a large scale.

“We believe these strong ties between battery technologies and finite metal resources must be broken for a path toward sustainable energy storage to emerge,” says Shiyu Zhang, an assistant professor chemistry and biochemistry and a Sustainability Institute affiliated faculty member who is conducting the research with Paulson. “Novel batteries constructed from abundant organic elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur can provide both more economical and sustainable routes to renewable energy storage.”

These organic electrode materials can be easily produced from biomass using benign processes that have a low environmental footprint. Despite the growing interest in sustainable alternatives to transition metal-based cathode materials, a key challenge is the experimental search for long-life materials that can maintain capacity over many charge cycles while meeting other performance constraints due to the large chemical space and lack of fundamental design principles.

Zhang and Paulson are using state-of-the-art active machine learning methods to accelerate the discovery of these new battery materials. Their work is supported by a $34,300 seed grant from the Sustainability Institute and recently received $437,330 in funding from the National Science Foundation.

Their main objective is to understand the influence of chemical structure on lifetime and output voltage. To address this challenge, they are developing a statistical model to predict the cycling stability of anthraquinones, one of the most common and structurally diverse classes of organic electrode materials.

Graduate student Madison Tuttle and chemistry undergraduate student Emma Brackman, members of the research team, have constructed a training set with more than 30 commercially available quinones. They have also collected a range of molecular features that describe the electronic and topological properties of these organic electrode materials. A doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Tuttle received Ohio State’s 2022 Next Generation Innovator of the Year award for her work on finding sustainable alternatives to metal-based electrode materials.

The team conducted analyses to determine the solubility of the anthraquinone training set, which is expected to correlate with the cycling stability.

“With these data in hand, we are poised to develop a new method for predicting long-term cycling stability, which can serve as a blueprint for replacing extensive trial-and-error screening common in OEM research,” Paulson says.

by Sustainability Institute communications staff

Categories: ResearchFaculty