Clare Grey: Structure and Dynamics in Batteries, Supercapacitors and Fuel Cell Materials

7th MARVEL Distinguished Lecture (MDL) - Clare Grey Recorded on October 26, 2016. Abstract — This talk will describe recent applications of NMR spectroscopy and pair distribution function (PDF) analysis of total scattering data to study electrode materials for energy storage and conversion. In particular, the focus will be on areas of our work where the combination of theory and experiment has been critical for interpreting experimental data and/or for understanding electronic structure. The use of 6,7Li, 23Na and more recently 17O NMR spectroscopy to investigate structural disorder, defects and dynamics in paramagnetic materials will be described. Examples include the development of methods to understand how Mg substitution in Na manganates affects rate performance of a series of layered phases in Na-ion batteries, to quantify stacking faults in intergrowth structures, and to investigate the transport mechanism in the ionic and electronic conductor La2NiO4+. Many battery and supercapacitor materials are amorphous and methods to extract structure from these highly disordered systems and to determine the mechanisms for charge storage will be described. About the speaker — Clare P. Grey is the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge. She received a BA and D. Phil. (1991) in Chemistry from the University of Oxford. After post-doctoral fellowships in the Netherlands and at DuPont CR&D in Wilmington, DE, joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SBU) in 1994, moving Cambridge in 2009, maintaining an adjunct position at SBU. Her recent honours and awards include the 2011 Royal Society Kavli Lecture and Medal for work relating to the Environment/Energy and the Davy Award (2014), and the Arfvedson-Schlenk-Preis from the German Chemical Society (2015). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her current research interests include the use of solid state NMR and diffraction-based methods to determine structure-function relationships in materials for energy storage (batteries and supercapacitors), conversion (fuel cells) and carbon capture.