Neutron Summer School for the study of hydrogen storage materials
Participants and mentors of this year’s Neutron Summer School.
An international group of students and scientists recently completed Margarita Russina’s second ever Neutron Summer School program. Just like last year, the Summer School took place in mid-September on the HZB’s Wannsee campus, offering participants a week filled with a broad spectrum of classes and activities, all on the topic of neutron scattering methods in the study of hydrogen storage materials.
A balanced mixture of lectures on hydrogen storage technology basics, practical laboratory lessons, and working with the HZB’s scientific measuring equipment afforded participants an in-depth glimpse into this area of applied research. A lecture on metal hydrides by guest scientist Arndt Remhof (Empa) from Switzerland was one of the program highlights while HZB’s own Daniel Többens, Dirk Wallacher, and Moritz Schlegel made sure participants received all the mentoring they needed.
Lectures and practical workshops are as much a part of the Summer School experience as is its international flair. The twelve students enrolled in this year’s program hailed from Greece, China, Estland, Russia, Germany, and many other countries. The Neutron Summer School has a very strong reputation among the international scientific community. Most students learned about the program by word-of-mouth from their supervisors – our international colleagues at various universities and research institutes.
Many of the participants were greatly impressed by the HZB’s state-of-the-art scientific equipment: "I was surprised about the very good scientific infrastructure at HZB. It is possible to apply very good theoretical knowledge here by using high technology”, says Alexander Skarvelas from Greece. On top of a solid infrastructure, it is also the intensive mentoring, which makes the Neutron Summer School program so attractive to students, adds Dr. Lilai Li from China: „They always tried to answer my questions. The support was pretty good, I learned a lot in this week”.
- Lithium-sulphur batteries with lean electrolyte: problem areas clarifiedUsing a non-destructive method, a team at HZB investigated practical lithium-sulphur pouch cells with lean electrolyte for the first time. With operando neutron tomography, they could visualise in real-time how the liquid electrolyte distributes and wets the electrodes across multilayers during charging and discharging. These findings offer valuable insights into the cell failure mechanisms and are helpful to design compact Li-S batteries with a high energy density in formats relevant to industrial applications.
- Berlin Science Award goes to Philipp AdelhelmBattery researcher Prof. Dr. Philipp Adelhelm has been awarded the 2024 Berlin Science Award. He is a professor at the Institute of Chemistry at Humboldt University in Berlin (HU) and heads a joint research group at HU and the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB). The materials scientist and electrochemist is investigating sustainable batteries, which play a key role in the success of the energy transition. He is one of the leading international experts in the field of sodium-ion batteries.
- Sodium-ion batteries: New storage mechanism for cathode materialsLi-ion and Na-ion batteries operate through a process called intercalation, where ions are stored and exchanged between two chemically different electrodes. In contrast, co-intercalation, a process in which both ions and solvent molecules are stored simultaneously, has traditionally been considered undesirable due to its tendency to cause rapid battery failure. Against this traditional view, an international research team led by Philipp Adelhelm has now demonstrated that co-intercalation can be a reversible and fast process for cathode materials in Na-ion batteries. The approach of jointly storing ions and solvents in cathode materials provides a new handle for designing batteries with high efficiency and fast charging capabilities. The results are published in Nature Materials.