ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Lithium ion batteries offer tremendous potential as an enabling technology for sustainable transportation and development. However, their widespread usage as the energy storage solution for electric mobility and grid-level integration of renewables is impeded by the fact that current state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries have energy densities that are too small, charge- and discharge rates that are too low, and costs that are too high. Highly publicized instances of catastrophic failure of lithium ion batteries raise questions of safety. Understanding the limitations to battery performance and origins of the degradation and failure is highly complex due to the difficulties in studying interrelated processes that take place at different length and time scales in a corrosive environment. In the project, we will (1) develop and implement quantitative methods to study the complex interrelations between structure and electrochemistry occurring at the nano-, micron-, and milli-scales in lithium ion battery active materials and electrodes, (2) conduct systematic experimental studies with our new techniques to understand the origins of performance limitations and to develop design guidelines for achieving high performance and safe batteries, and (3) investigate economically viable engineering solutions based on these guidelines to achieve high performance and safe lithium ion batteries.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2016-05-01, End date: 2021-04-30

Li-ion battery is ubiquitous and has emerged as the major contender to power electric vehicles, yet Li-ion is slowly but surely reaching its limits and controversial debates on lithium supply cannot be ignored. New sustainable battery chemistries must be developed and the most appealing alternatives are to use Ca or Mg metal anodes which would bring a breakthrough in terms of energy density relying on much more abundant elements. Since Mg and Ca do not appear to be plagued by dendrite formation like Li, metal anodes could thus safely be used. While standard electrolytes forming stable passivation layers at the electrode/electrolyte interfaces enabled the success of the Li-ion technology, the migration of divalent cations through a passivation layer was thought to be impossible. Thus, all research efforts to date have been devoted to the formulation of electrolytes that do not form such layer. This approach comes with complex electrolyte, highly corrosive and with narrow electrochemical stability window leading to incompatibility with high voltage cathodes thus penalizing energy density. The applicant demonstrated that calcium can be reversibly plated and stripped through a stable passivation layer when transport properties within the electrolyte are tuned (decreasing ion pair formation). CAMBAT aims at developing new electrolytes forming stable passivation layers and allowing the migration of Ca2+ and Mg2+. Such a dramatic shift in the methodology would allow considering a completely new family of electrolytes enabling the evaluation of high voltage cathode materials that cannot be tested in the electrolytes available nowadays. 1Ah prototype cells will be assembled as proof of concept, targets for energy density and cost being ca. 300 Wh/kg and 250 $/kWh, respectively, thus doubling the energy density while dividing by at least a factor of 2 the price when compared to state of the art Li-ion batteries and having the potential for being SAFER (absence of dendrite).

1 688 705 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

"The urgent need to develop inexpensive and ubiquitous solar energy conversion cannot be overstated. Solution processed organic semiconductors can enable this goal as they support drastically less expensive fabrication techniques compared to traditional semiconductors. Molecular organic semiconductors (MOSs) offer many advantages to their more-common pi-conjugated polymer counterparts, however a clear and fundamental challenge to enable the goal of high performance solution-processable molecular organic semiconductor devices is to develop the ability to control the crystal packing, crystalline domain size, and mixing ability (for multicomponent blends) in the thin-film device geometry. The CEMOS project will accomplish this by pioneering innovative methods of “bottom-up” crystal engineering for organic semiconductors. We will employ specifically tailored molecules designed to leverage both thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of molecular organic semiconductor systems to direct and control crystalline packing, promote crystallite nucleation, compatibilize disparate phases, and plasticize inelastic materials. We will demonstrate that our new classes of materials can enable the tuning of the charge carrier transport and morphology in MOS thin films, and we will evaluate their performance in actual thin-film transistor (TFT) and organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices. Our highly interdisciplinary approach, combining material synthesis and device fabrication/evaluation, will not only lead to improvements in the performance and stability of OPVs and TFTs but will also give deep insights into how the crystalline packing—independent from the molecular structure—affects the optoelectronic properties. The success of CEMOS will rapidly advance the performance of MOS devices by enabling reproducible and tuneable performance comparable to traditional semiconductors—but at radically lower processing costs."

1 477 472 €

Start date: 2014-01-01, End date: 2018-12-31

The simulation of multidisciplinary applications use very often a combination of heterogeneous and disjoint numerical techniques that are hard to put together by the user, and whose mathematical foundation is obscure. An example of this situation is the numerical modeling of the physical processes taking place in nuclear fusion reactors. This problem, which can be modeled by a set of partial differential equations, is extremely challenging. It involves (essentially) fluid mechanics, electromagnetics, thermal radiation and neutronics. The most common numerical approaches to each of these problems separately are very different and their coupling is a hard and inefficient task. Our main objective in this proposal is to develop and analyze a unified numerical framework based on stabilized finite element methods based on multi-scale decompositions capable to simulate all the physical processes taking place in nuclear fusion technology. The project aims at giving a substantial contribution to the numerical approximation of every physical process as well as efficient coupling techniques for the multiphysics problems. The development of the numerical formulations we propose and their application require mastering different physics, designing numerical approximations for these different physical problems, analyzing mathematically the resulting methods, implementing them in an efficient way in parallel platforms and understanding the results and drawing conclusions, both from a physical and from an engineering perspective. Advanced research in physical modeling, numerical approximations, mathematical analysis and computer implementation are the keys to meeting these objectives. The successful implementation of the project will provide advanced numerical techniques for the simulation of the processes taking place in a fusion reactor. A deliverable product of the project will be a unified finite element software package that will be an extremely valuable tool.

1 320 000 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2015-12-31