Image: Privat
Research group The future is inorganic!
Climate change won't be solved by good intentions. It needs materials that store and convert energy cheaply, safely and at scale, and most of those materials are inorganic. That is where we work.
Our main focus is sodium-ion batteries. Sodium is abundant, cheap and found everywhere, which makes it an obvious alternative to lithium wherever cost matters more than weight. The catch is that electrode materials and separators developed for lithium don't simply carry over. So we make new ones: we synthesise electrode materials (including by plasma synthesis, together with the Department of Physics), develop separators from cellulose and electrospun fibres, and work out what actually limits performance once everything is put together in a cell.
We haven't abandoned lithium entirely. Together with Toyota Motor Europe, we are developing new ways to recycle lithium-ion batteries, because the metals in today's batteries are the raw materials for tomorrow's.
such as metal ion batteries. In addition to synthesising new materials, we are also developing new strategies for battery recycling together with industrial partners.
We're also the maintainers of ECCE, the Extensible Computational Chemistry Environment. ECCE provides a GUI for several different computational codes, such as ORCA, Gaussian, NWChem and MOPAC, and is free.
You'll find more information here.
The introductory day at the conference in Inorganic Chemistry in Umeå, focuses on the periodic system.
