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Using Electrochemistry for a More Sustainable Future

MIT Associate Professor Betar Gallant utilizes electrochemical reactions to develop new sustainable technologies, including systems that capture carbon dioxide emissions and produce higher-energy rechargeable Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles.

“If you look at some early papers, the concepts of how a lithium-ion battery or a lithium metal anode worked were sketched out by hand — they had been deduced to be true, before the field even had the tools to prove all the mechanisms were actually occurring — yet even now, those ideas are still turning out to be right!” Betar Gallant, MIT associate professor says  , “that’s because if you truly understand the basic principles of electrochemistry, you can start to intuit how systems will behave. Once you can do that, you can really begin to engineer better materials and devices.”

Topics:
Batteries Electrification Energy Power

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] BETAR GALLANT: I see electrochemistry as almost the creation of new tools. By taking what is otherwise a chemical reaction and by transforming it into an electrochemical reaction, we can open up totally new transformation pathways. In order to keep our climate from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, it's clear that we need to be doing carbon capture. Today, we capture somewhere on the order

    00:00:32 of 40 megatons of CO2 per year. And within a few decades, we need to be capturing something on the order of 10 gigatons. Today's carbon capture systems are really large and really complex. It's also very energy intensive. The reason for that is CO2 reacts with a sorbent. We don't have to put energy into that step. But in order to replenish or what's called regenerate the sorbent so that it

    00:00:58 can continue to bind CO2, we have to put in a lot of energy. We discovered that it's scientifically possible to conduct an electrochemical transformation on CO2 in the bound state when it's reacted with a sorbent. As a result, this has opened up immense possibilities in the ways that we know how to manipulate and transform CO2. One of the biggest needs we face right now is to take batteries and push them to have higher energy density, both in terms of weight and volume. And my work is looking at how do we get down

    00:01:34 to the fundamental electrochemical reactions and get the macroscopic energy densities that we know we need. At a high level, there are two categories of batteries. One is rechargeable batteries, like lithium ion. On the other end of the spectrum, we have very high energy density batteries. These are called primary batteries. They play a really important role in technologies ranging from autonomous vehicles all the way to implantable medical devices.

    00:02:00 The way that you get really high energy in a cell is you combine the highest energy anode, which is lithium metal, with a really high energy density cathode. Typically, in the field, we've been looking at reactions that give us 1 to maybe 4 electrons per molecule at the cathode. In the reactions that we've developed, we can get up to 15. This has allowed us to develop entirely new classes of reactants that at the cell level

    00:02:28 can boost the energy density of a lithium primary battery on the market by at least 20%. In the future, we're pretty much all going to be driving electric vehicles. And when you're buying a car nowadays, if it's an electric vehicle, you're really largely buying the battery. So the battery is really everything. The very next step that the battery has to take in its evolution is to go from a graphite anode

    00:02:56 to a lithium metal anode. And all of the challenges with lithium metal arise at the interface, what we call the solid electrolyte interface, or SEI. By understanding what's happening in the SEI, we can develop new methodologies, new strategies to build a better interface internal to the cell while it's cycling, and advance it to a stage where it has real prospects for use in electric vehicle batteries.

    00:03:24 Electrochemistry to me is very intellectual in a way, because you can't see it. You can only see signatures that it happened. And I like to figure out how I can direct this unseen process and gain control of it, and then use those insights to engineer entirely new processes of benefit to society. [MUSIC PLAYING]