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High-Energy Hybridized States Enable Long-Lived Hot Electrons in Cobaloxime-Silicon Nanocrystal System

Daniel Morton — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:08:30 +0000

High-Energy Hybridized States Enable Long-Lived Hot Electrons in Cobaloxime-Silicon Nanocrystal System Daniel Morton Sun, 02/08/2026 - 11:08

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY, 2026, 148, 6, 6412-6421

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Unlocking a Cleaner Way to Do Chemistry

Daniel Morton — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 15:11:48 +0000

Unlocking a Cleaner Way to Do Chemistry Daniel Morton Tue, 09/30/2025 - 09:11

Daniel Morton

Taking the heat out of chemical manufacturing

For nearly two centuries chemists have relied on a simple principle when building molecules and materials: to make something new you have to apply energy, sometimes in the form of chemical energy, but most often in the form of heat.

From producing plastics to creating life-saving medicines, many of the chemical reactions that form the foundation of our modern world are driven by thermal energy, often generated by burning fossil fuels. This approach, while effective, is often incredibly energy-intensive and can lead to a host of other issues, from unwanted byproducts to a large carbon footprint. In essence it is like using a sledgehammer to build a delicate piece of furniture, while it might get the pieces together, it’s inefficient, causes unnecessary damage, and creates a lot of waste in the process.

But what if there was a better way? What if we could take the heat out of chemical manufacturing and use a more precise, sustainable energy source?

RASEI fellows are part of a growing wave of research that is doing just that by using light to drive chemical transformations. This isn’t about using light to just heat things up, it’s about harnessing the specific energy of photons to activate molecules in a targeted and efficient way. This approach, known as photocatalysis, is unlocking a cleaner, more controlled way to build the molecules we need. It is poised to transform everything from the creation of pharmaceuticals to the development of new and sustainable materials and plastics.

The shift to light-driven chemistry is not merely an academic exercise; it is a critical step toward a more sustainable and efficient industrial future. RASEI researchers, working across a range of national collaborations, have published more than 15 research papers in the past year, reflecting their commitment to innovation in this space. The research approaches the problem from a range of perspectives, exploring new chemical pathways and understanding the factors that control the efficiencies of these reacting.

The benefits of collaborative research the brings together a range of approaches to solve problems together is well illustrated in this roundup of recent research, including highlights from some large national collaborations, including contributions from U.S. Department of Energy funded Energy Frontier Research Centers (the Bio-inspired Light-Escalated Chemistry Center (BioLEC) and the Ensembles of Photosynthetic Nanoreactors (EPN)), and a National Science Foundation funded Center for Chemical Innovation (The Center for Sustainable Photoredox Catalysis (SuPRCat))

The summaries that follow provide a glimpse into this exciting work, detailing some of our latest discoveries and describing some of the tangible ways we are using light to create cleaner, more effective, and sustainable chemical processes.

Recent Research Highlights

Shining new light on an old problem: Breaking down ‘Forever Chemicals’ and building the next generation of materials

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08327-7

Using a new catalyst and visible light, researchers have developed a chemical “scalpel” to degrade persistent pollutants and enable new, more precise chemical reactions.

The global challenge of “forever chemicals” has made the headlines for years. The carbon-fluorine (C–F) bond is one of the strongest in all of chemistry. For decades the sheer strength of the C–F bond has been a blessing and a curse. This incredible strength is what makes “forever chemicals”, like PFAS, so stable and useful in everything from non-stick pans to waterproof clothing but is also the reason that they are nearly impossible to break down. This has been a major contributor to the growing plastic waste crisis, and a key reasons for these compounds to be now known as one of the hardest pollutants to remove from the environment. A recent collaborative study, including RASEI Fellow Niels Damrauer, has a new solution for this problem. Development of a new catalyst that acts like a chemical scalpel, using blue light to precisely sever this famously inert bond. This approach not only offers a new way to degrade these persistent pollutants but also opens the door to using what were previously considered unreactive fluorinated molecules as building blocks for new chemical transformations and products.

This study is an illustrative example of a modern, collaborative approach to chemical innovation, as part of the NSF funded Center for Sustainable Photoredox Catalysis (SuPRCat). The research team came at the problem from two different angles: computational modeling and hands-on experimentation. The computational chemists first used powerful simulations to design and predict the behavior of a new organic catalyst. This helped them understand exactly how the catalyst could use low-energy, visible blue light to act as our "chemical scalpel," targeting and breaking the C–F bonds without the need for intense heat.

With this knowledge, the experimental chemists then created the catalyst in the lab. They showed that it could precisely snip the C-F bonds in a variety of molecules, demonstrating it was capable of both degrading persistent pollutants like PFAS and building new chemical structures that were previously difficult to construct.

The success of this research with a simple, abundant energy source like visible light shows that chemical reactions don’t have to be energy intensive. This research describes the power of precise, light-driven chemistry. By designing a catalyst that can target and activate some of the toughest bonds in chemistry, this team has not only revealed a potential path forward for degrading PFAS, but also demonstrated a new tool for chemists to build molecules in a cleaner and more energy efficient way.

A Chemical Blueprint for Turning Sunlight and Carbon Dioxide into Fuel

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsmaterialsau.5c00010

Combining computational design and experimental research, scientists have engineered a well-aligned connection between two materials, creating a more efficient pathway for clean energy.

The search to create carbon-neutral fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO₂) is one of the most exciting frontiers in sustainable energy. However, it is not enough to simply find a catalyst that can do the job, the real challenge lies in designing a system where all the components work in harmony. Imagine having two brilliant devices that are designed to work together, but they just can’t quite “talk” to each other. One is an incredible light sensitive material that captures sunlight, and the other is a special catalyst that can turn CO₂ into fuel. Previous research has found that when you bring these two components together their electronic energies were mismatched, causing poor ‘communication’ between the components, leading to the overall system being inefficient. Research led by RASEI Fellow Nate Neale uses a combination of advanced computational modeling and sophisticated experimentation to engineer an aligned electronic “bridge” to better connect the two materials, revealing a more efficient communication pathway, and hence a more effective overall system.

To solve the energy mismatch between the components the team adopted a feedback loop between computational modeling and experimentation. Powerful computational tools enabled the design of a range of potential linking molecules to explore how they would influence the electronic coupling between the silicon nanocrystal (the solar panel) and the catalyst. This approach acted as a “chemical blueprint”, allowing them to predict which design would create the most well-aligned connection. The team then took these findings to the lab and synthesized the most promising candidates and tested their real-world performance, comparing them to the properties predicted by the models. The results confirmed the predications and demonstrated that a specific, directly bonded molecular bridge was the most effective design.

This work describes a foundational step in the search for fuels synthesized by light. By developing an approach for the fundamental challenge of aligning a solar collector and a CO₂ catalyst, the team has provided a critical design guideline for building more efficient and powerful devices in the future.

Supercharging Chemistry: A jump forward in light-driven chemistry

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adw1648

New collaborative research involving RASEI Fellow Niels Damrauer, addresses one of the ‘house of cards’ problems sometimes critical in photoredox catalysis.

Think about how you build a house of cards, every time you add a new card, there is a chance the whole thing will fall apart. This is a challenge often faced by chemists when they are trying to put together the components needed for a light-driven reaction. While this type of chemistry has huge potential in making the chemistry cleaner and more efficient, one of the features that can cause the whole thing to fall apart is a phenomenon called back electron transfer, where the desired chemical reaction is reversed, wasting energy and limiting the kinds of reaction that can be performed.

This collaborative team that includes RASEI Fellow Niels Damrauer from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� and the groups of Garret Miyake and Robert Paton from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, has developed a new catalyst system that overcomes this fundamental obstacle. Published in a recent issue of Science, this work introduces a ‘super-reducing’ organic photoredox catalyst that, through preventing this backward reaction, opens the door to powerful new redox chemistries.

To better understand this discovery it is useful to think of the process like filling a bucket with water. In typical photoredox reactions, the bucket has a leak. As water is poured into the bucket (adding energy from light), some of it immediately drains out. This ‘leak’ is back electron transfer (BET), and it is especially problematic for complex and difficult reactions that require a lot of energy – it is like trying to fill a very leaky bucket with a very slow faucet.

The research collaboration, part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Center for Chemical Innovation (CCI) Center for Sustainable Photoredox Catalysis (SuPRCat) took inspiration from nature to develop a solution for this problem. In photosynthesis plants use a process called proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) to efficiently capture and store energy from sunlight, preventing energy loss. The team used a combination of sophisticated computational modeling and experimental investigation to design a catalyst that incorporates a similar mechanism. When the catalyst is energized by light it simultaneously transfers an electron to the target molecule and releases a proton (a hydrogen atom without its electron). This prevents the reaction from going backwards. This small change has a huge impact on how the reaction proceeds, it is essentially like patching the leak in the bucket as you pour the water in, ensuring that all the energy is used for the desired reaction.

As is often the case with research, the path to this discovery was not a straight line. The investigations initially focused on changing an existing catalyst framework. During these experiments they noticed that one of the new catalysts (PC40Me) was unexpectedly effective. The reduction of benzene is known to be a difficult transformation, but reactions catalyzed with PC40Me were possible. They found that under the reaction conditions PC40Me was transforming into a new chemical structure, and it was this new system that was efficient for the historically difficult reduction of benzene. Armed with this knowledge the team built new catalyst designs around the new structure, creating a more efficient catalyst (named PC8). PC8 is not only a ‘super reducer’ capable of reducing a broad range of aromatic compounds under mild conditions, it also proved to be extremely robust.

The key features of this work lies in its potential to be a new tool in how we design and build everything from pharmaceuticals to plastics. By providing a way to perform these difficult reduction reactions more efficiently and sustainably, this catalyst system has the potential to reduce waste and energy consumption. By opening the door to a transformation that has typically been thought of as difficult and un-efficient, it could act as an enabling technology in the synthesis of new classes of molecules that were previously out of reach.

This work highlights the power of collaboration. The combination of different tools and approaches that were required to complete this work would have been prohibitive for a single research group. By combining expertise the team were able to unravel this complex chemical puzzle, not only demonstrating a new transformation, but providing some design rules that can be used by future photocatalysis practitioners in reducing BET.

Finding the On switch for more efficient light-driven chemistry

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60729-x

Collaboration led by RASEI members Obadiah Reid and Garry Rumbles solves a long-standing puzzle in important organic chemical transformation.

In the world of organic chemistry, making new molecules, the building blocks for everything from advanced electronic materials to pharmaceuticals, is a bit like being a chef. Chemists are always looking to improve the recipe, to make it faster, cheaper, more efficient, and produce less waste. In recent years one of the most exciting new ‘cooking techniques’ is nickel photocatalysis, which uses abundant, low-cost nickel and the power of light to enable chemists to build complex molecules under mild conditions.

This technique has emerged as something of a game-changer in building molecules, but it comes with a significant puzzle. The nickel catalyst, as it is normally added to a reaction, is in a dormant state (called a ‘pre-catalyst’). To get the reaction moving, the catalyst needs to be ‘woken up’. For years, scientists were not sure what the wake-up call was. The activation from pre-catalyst to the functioning catalyst was something of a black box, with numerous theories for what was happening. This led to the assumption that each reaction was unique, and each reaction required its own individual and complicated startup sequence. This has often required a lot of work to find the right ‘On switch’.

This collaborative study, led by RASEI researchers Obadiah Reid and Garry Rumbles at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), brings together expertise from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and Northeastern University. Together, the scientists have identified key features of the transformation from pre-catalyst to active catalyst. In the report, just published in Nature Communications, the team shows that there is a universal ‘On switch’ to start these powerful reactions, and the key to this transformation is light.

Imagine a high-tech machine delivered in a locked crate. You know that once you get it out and get it running, it can do amazing things, but you don’t have the key. For years, chemists were essentially trying to pick the lock in different ways every time they wanted to use it. This study describes a universal key for getting the crate open.

It was found that light, either directly, or transferred from another light-absorbing molecule, provide a jolt of energy that breaks a bond in the nickel pre-catalyst structure. This process, which is called photolysis, activates the nickel complex, getting it ready to do the chemistry. This initial step is something that has previously been proposed but never fully proven.

The team brought together a sophisticated array of tools to effectively investigate this mechanism, including incredibly fast laser systems that can watch chemical changes happen in fractions of a second. This allowed them to witness the ‘unlocking’ process in real-time and identify the exact sequence of events. They observed that after the initial light-induced bond breaking, the catalyst can then interact with molecules in the surrounding solvent, forming a temporary ‘reservoir’ that holds the catalyst in a state ready for the main reaction.

Building this body of evidence and developing these findings required a significant team effort, bringing together scientists from across the country, from multiple national labs and universities. RASEI Scientists at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� and NREL used advanced spectroscopy to track the catalyst’s behavior, while researchers at SLAC used high-powered X-rays to confirm changes in the structure of the nickel complex. This combination of knowledge and experience with cutting-edge instrumentation was essential in providing a complete understanding of these reactions begin.

Development of unified explanation for how one of the most important tools in an organic chemist’s toolbox is activated has important implications. Understanding this fundamental activation step allows chemists to move from guessing to designing. Not only does this support improvement in the activation of existing reactions, it also provides opportunities to design new transformations, all of which will streamline the manufacture of chemical commodities, such as pharmaceuticals and materials.

Scientists move microscopic solar chemical factories out of water to unlock new transformations

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/D5SE00263J

Four RASEI Fellows work together to expand the potential applications of nanoparticle photocatalysts

We all understand the power of the sun. We feel it on a hot summer’s day, we see it harnessed in solar panels that power our homes and cities. Chemical photocatalysis develops approaches to shrink that ability to harness this energy down to a molecular scale, and uses this energy to power chemical reaction, to power the building of important organic molecules, the foundations of pharmaceuticals, materials, and clean fuels.

One of the technologies used to harness light on the molecular level are a class of particles called organic nanoparticles (oNPs). Think of them as tiny, solar-powered factories, expertly designed to capture light and use its energy to drive chemical reactions. The oNPs are made from readily available earth-abundant materials, offering a cheap, clean, and sustainable alternative to a range of more traditional chemical reactions, which can often rely on rare, expensive metals that are hard to get hold of and can produce significant waste.

However, the oNPs, for all their potential as chemical factories, do have one significant limitation, they can only be built and operated in water. This is a fundamental roadblock. While water is essential for life, it is often a very poor environment for performing chemical reactions and can be very detrimental for the complex and delicate sequence of chemical transformations required for producing valuable products. The full power of these nano-factories was, quite literally, stuck in the water.

To understand this challenge, imagine that you have designed the world’s most efficient and powerful engine. It is a true engineering breakthrough, but it comes with a major catch, it can only run while completely submerged in the ocean. This is fine if you want to get around in a submarine, or a boat, but you can’t put it into a car, or a plane, or a generator on land, where you need it most. The potential of this new innovation is trapped, unable to be used for countless valuable applications.

That is similar to the situation faced by the researchers, led by RASEI Fellows Stephen Barlow, Seth Marder, Obadiah Reid and Garry Rumbles. The oNPs were confined to water-based reaction media, in order to realize their full potential the team needed to find a way to move these delicate ‘nano-factories’ from water to the ‘dry-land’ of other chemical environments, known as non-aqueous solvents, without the oNPs collapsing or breaking down.

This study describes a solution that the team developed. They devised a multi-step process to gently coax the oNPs out of their native water environment and prepare them to operate in different chemical solvents.

The process they developed is analogous to making salad dressing in the kitchen. It begins by mixing the water containing the nanoparticles with an oily substance (in this study oleic acid) and shaking it. This creates an emulsion, where tiny droplets of water are suspended in the oil, much like a vinaigrette. During this process the oNPs leave the water and move into the oil, which wraps around them like a protective coating. Finally the water is gently remove, leaving the oNPs safely suspended in their new oily environment. The protective layer formed around them allows them to be seamlessly transferred to a range of new non-aqueous solvents, ready to get to work.

A key part of this study was demonstrating that the oNP ‘factories’ were still functional after their transfer to new solvent systems. Using a suite of tools the team were able to confirm that the transferred oNPs could still absorb light and perform the chemical reactions.

With these findings the potential of the oNPs can be explored and expanded. It reveals new opportunities, not only in putting together organic molecules, but also in the synthesis of clean fuels, such as hydrogen.

September 2025

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Breakthroughs in materials science are helping to improve tomorrows energy storage

Daniel Morton — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:18:38 +0000

Breakthroughs in materials science are helping to improve tomorrows energy storage Daniel Morton Fri, 08/15/2025 - 09:18

Daniel Morton

The future of energy storage is being written at the molecular level. As renewable energy is transforming how we generate electricity, battery storage technologies are emerging as the backbone of a resilient, flexible power grid. Advances in materials science are key to unlocking their massive potential to change the way we interact with energy.

Effective and sustainable energy storage is critical to a modern and resilient power grid. Independent of how the electrons are generated, the ability to flexibly store and supply electricity strengthens the grid and improves our energy security.

The path to a reliable and sustainable energy economy runs directly through better, more efficient batteries. Today’s power grid demands storage solutions that are more efficient, built from materials that are abundant, affordable and environmentally responsible. This intersection of performance and sustainability presents one of the most exciting tensions in modern energy research.

In the last six months RASEI Fellows have publish more than ten research articles that explore a range of materials science challenges associated with battery storage, developing solutions at the molecular level that could have profound impacts on how we store energy on the grid-scale, here we highlight a selection of this recent work.

Why Batteries Are Essential For Grid Flexibility

Battery storage offers exceptional flexibility to a modern power grid, providing rapid response capabilities that can balance supply and demand within seconds rather than minutes or hours. A key benefit of battery systems is that they can be deployed virtually anywhere, from urban centers to remote locations, creating opportunities for more resilient and distributed grids that adapt to local needs and conditions.

Materials Science Engineering Charges Innovation

At its core, battery performance is fundamentally about engineering better materials: how molecules are structured, how electricity flows, and how charged particles travel through carefully designed and engineered structures. This is where cutting-edge materials science research is essential, providing the tools to better design battery components at the molecular scale to achieve faster charging, longer lifespans, and higher energy storage. These are features that will be critical as we scale up to grid-level storage.

Consider how a typical rechargeable battery, such as a lithium-ion battery, works: charged particles (such as lithium ions) move between the two sides of the battery during charging and discharging. Think of it like cars moving between parking lots (the two sides of the battery, the positive and negative electrodes). The ability to park more cars represents the ability to carry more energy. When you use the battery the cars (the lithium ions) travel between the lots through a highway (the electrolyte). To use the highway, they have to pay a toll. In this case they give up an electron, which produces the electricity that powers your device. When you charge the battery the cars move back to the original lot, but you have to give them an electron to go back through the toll.

Repeated charging and discharging can cause damage to the parking lots, the highway between them, and the cars can even get stuck. Building better electrodes (parking lots), more effective electrolytes (the highway) and better understanding of how the charged particles act (the cars), teams can develop more effective and robust energy storage.

Recent Research Highlights

Boron-Alloyed Silicon Nanoparticle Anodes can improve the performance for lithium-Ion Batteries.

Read the article here

By mixing some boron with your silicon you can make a more robust battery electrode!

With a theoretical energy density ten times higher than graphite, Silicon (Si) has inspired interest as a next generation anode active material for lithium-ion batteries. In the general analogy, this is building a more robust parking lot for the charged state. When you charge and discharge a lithium-ion battery, on a molecular scale this is achieved by the pumping in, and pumping out of lithium ions (cars going in and out of the parking lot), which come with a significant volume change. (This would be like the floors of a multi-story parking lot changing size as cars drive in and out. Realistic on the atomic scale, not so much on the car-scale…) Silicon-based anodes have been found to be unstable to this constant change in volume which can lead to instability and failure. One strategy to address this is to move from having the silicon anode being a solid slab, to being a series of nanoparticles, which helps to reduce this mechanical stress, but this comes with another problem, the increased surface area of the particles allows more chemical side reactions, which is another big problem. There has been much research investigating the materials science and surface chemistry to reduce the unwanted side reactions. A key finding from recent research is that the best way to prevent unwanted side reactions is to essentially isolate the silicon surface from the electrolyte media it is in. This is where this research, led by RASEI Fellow Nate Neale, comes in.

By mixing, or alloying, the silicon with boron, the anodes were found to perform better and last longer. The more boron added to the nanoparticles, the more robust they were. In fact, the team saw a 3x improvement in lifetime by incorporating boron. The team proposes that by making the nanoparticles out of a mixture of silicon and boron, the presence of the boron creates an “electric double layer” effect, essentially providing a protective layer at the surface of the nanoparticle, shielding from the unwanted side reactions. This saw some real improvements in the performance of the electrolytes, not just a 3x improvement in the calendar lifetime, but an 82.5% capacity retention after 1000 cycles, the pure silicon electrodes reached the end-of-life (<80% capacity retention) in fewer than 400 cycles under similar conditions.

Boron creates a strong electrical field at the nanoparticle surface that attracts and concentrates ions from the surrounding electrolyte, forming a stable, dense layer that acts like a permanent shield. This work reveals an underexplored parameter in the design and optimization of silicon anodes that could prove valuable in the next-generation of lithium-ion batteries.

This breakthrough could accelerate the adoption of silicon anodes in battery applications, such as electric vehicles, where longer-lasting batteries are essential to address range anxiety. The research team is now working to identify the optimal silicon-boron ratio that maximizes both capacity and longevity, potentially bringing us closer to the next generation of high-performance lithium-ion batteries.

How Molecular Shape Impacts Battery Performance: New Insights for Flow Batteries

Read the article here

Making seemingly minor molecular changes to the structure of charge storage chemicals can have significant impacts on the performance of redox flow batteries.

Redox Flow Batteries offer a promising solution for large-scale energy storage. Unlike the lithium-ion batteries in your phone, flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes that flow through the system. This design allows them to store massive amounts of energy for long periods, making them ideal for stabilizing electrical grids.

However, making these batteries practical requires finding the right chemical compounds that are stable, efficient, and cost effective. This article describes collaborative research that includes teams led by RASEI Fellow Mike Toney and former RASEI Fellow Mike Marshak. The teams were exploring the optimization of chromium-based compounds as charge carriers. The aim was that by changing the structure of the organic chelate ligand that surrounds the chromium atom, they could better understand the relationship between structure and performance and use that understanding to design more efficient systems.

Two very similar chromium compounds were prepared; CrPDTA and CrPDTA-OH, which differ only by the addition of a single hydroxyl group (-OH) on the organic framework. Hydroxy groups are often added to compounds to improve their solubility in water, but in this case the team observed a drop in the performance of the molecule. The hydroxylated compound showed:

Slower reaction rates – The CrPDTA-OH transferred electrons 100 times more slowly than the non-hydroxylated.
Reduced efficiency – battery efficiency dropped from 99.3% to 98.2%.
Increased hydrogen gas production – more energy was wasted producing unwanted hydrogen gas in a side reaction instead of being stored.

It’s kind of like if some of the cars had one flat tire. They are going to be worse at transporting charge back and forth, and they might do things you don’t want them to.

Using a suite of advanced characterization techniques the team discovered that the addition of the hydroxyl group caused a distortion of the molecular shape around the central chromium ion. This distorted shape weakened the bonds between the metal atom and the organic chelate ligand, which reduced the efficiency of electron transfer.

This research reveals a fundamental principle for designing redox flow battery materials: molecular geometry matters immensely. The chromium atom needs to adopt an octahedral arrangement to work efficiently. Any distortion of this shape leads to reduced performance. This study also confirms why maintaining the precise structure is so important. It prevents water molecules from interfering with the chromium atom, which would cause the unwanted production of hydrogen gas instead of energy storage.

Researchers Discover The Hidden ‘Dance’ Of Ions That Could Inform The Design Of Grid-Scale Energy Storage

Read the article here

Insights into the processes of charge movement in the electrolyte could inform future battery design

The electrolyte of the battery is the highway that connects the two parking lots together. This research that brings together an international collaborative team, including researchers from three US universities, three National labs, and researchers from the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and RASEI Fellow Mike Toney, reveals important features of this highway in zinc-ion based batteries.

While most people are familiar with lithium-ion batteries in their phones and devices, zinc-ion batteries offer compelling advantages for large-scale electricity storage. Zinc is more abundant and thus affordable, zinc-ion batteries use water-based electrolytes that are much less likely to overheat or explode, Zinc-ion batteries can pack a lot of energy into a small space, they are very energy dense.

The electrolyte is the media through which the charged ions pass through during charge and discharge cycles. In our metaphor the electrolyte is the highway on which the cars travel back and forth. The properties of the electrolyte can dictate a number of features of the batteries performance, how fast it charges, how long it lasts, and how much energy it can store. This research has explored how these ions, or ‘cars’, act during transport, and they have observed that it is not plain driving, the ions cluster and form convoys as they move through the electrolyte. The way the zinc sulfate ions travel is far more dynamic and complex than previously understood.

Using advanced x-ray techniques in combination with advanced computer modeling the team were able to explore the molecular structure of the electrolyte at different stages of the charge / discharge cycle. They found that the ions don’t just float around independently, instead they form clusters, like cars forming a convoy. It was observed that the zinc ions surround themselves with exactly six water molecules and clusters formed in a range of sizes, from just 2 ions all the way up to 22 ions.

You might expect that they clusters would move more slowly, like a traffic jam on the highway, but the team found that while the clusters do reduce conductivity, the battery still works. Critical to this is the timing of the clusters. The clusters are incredibly short lived, existing for only picoseconds (trillionths of a second) at a time. Instead of having a traffic jam, it is like having really busy traffic that is moving so fast that it is constantly reorganizing itself and so it never actually gets stuck.

This offers insights that can be applied in future battery designs; Ions form diverse, temporary partnerships that vary in size and composition, the system is constantly undergoing reorganization, transport happens both through vehicular motion (cars moving through the highway), and hopping between clusters (it would be like someone jumping from car to car in an action movie). These insights could improve future electrolyte design which could improve battery performance and potentially open the door to new battery chemistries that could be used for a broader range of applications, such as grid-scale storage.

By developing a more informed understanding of how charge is transported in electrolytes we can improve our designs in the future. Instead of trying to avoid cluster, we can harness it to improve the efficiency of charge transport in battery technologies.

Inside the battery: X-Ray Vision Reveals How Sodium Really Moves and Stores Energy

Read the article here

Sodium-ion batteries have the potential to be game changers for grid-scale storage with their abundance, low cost, and sustainability advantages over existing lithium-ion technologies. A key hurdle in their development is that we don’t yet fully understand how sodium actually moves and stores energy on the molecular level. This international collaboration, led by RASEI Fellow Mike Toney, uses cutting-edge X-ray techniques and computational modeling, provides insight into these promising battery chemistries.

Sustainable battery technologies are central to the modern power grid and meeting the growing demand of electrification technologies, such as electric vehicles. Among the growing array of battery chemistries Sodium-Ion Batteries (NIBs) address many of the challenges associated with lithium-ion batteries, and can even benefit from the work done to bring lithium-ion technologies to scale. This is swapping out the cars in our analogy from lithium-ions to more affordable sodium-ions. Sodium is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, making it dramatically more affordable and sustainable than lithium. While NIBs don’t yet match the energy density of lithium-ion based designs, they are ideal for grid storage applications where space is less constrained, but cost and sustainability matter enormously. Furthermore, NIBs can be produced using lithium-ion manufacturing facilities, enabling rapid deployment without the associated infrastructure costs.

The main hurdle has been developing anode materials that efficiently store and release sodium ions. Hard carbon shows promise but understanding exactly how sodium storage works at the molecular level remained elusive—a critical gap for large-scale manufacturing.

This research uses a combination of advanced X-ray spectroscopy techniques and computational modeling to peer inside the electrodes of a working NIB to watch the storage process unfold in real-time. Put simply they explored the details of a three step system where sodium ions first attach to surface defects in the hard carbon, then squeeze between the carbon layers, and finally cluster into the pores of the anode, providing insights and a road map for the design of NIBs in the future.

To gain more information about the details of these processes the team using X-ray total scattering, a technique that bounces high-energy X-rays off atoms and analyzes the scattered pattern to map exactly where atoms are positioned relative to each other. Think of it like echolocation to see in the dark, but for atomic structures! By taking a series of ‘snapshots’ of the NIBs at different stages of charging, the researchers could track how sodium atoms moved and arranged themselves during the process. The X-ray data reveals amazing levels of detail, revealing distinct signatures for different types of sodium storage, distinguishing between sodium atoms stuck to the surface defects of the hard carbon and those squeezed between carbon sheets, and those atoms clustered in pores.

Daniel Morton — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:21:05 +0000

A Chemical Blueprint for Turning Sunlight and Carbon Dioxide into Fuel Daniel Morton Mon, 04/07/2025 - 10:21

Daniel Morton

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