Poster award für HZB scientist at ICT2018
Katherine Ann Mazzio was awarded for her poster contribution at the ICT2018 in Caen.
At the International Conference on Thermoelectrics in July in Caen, France, Dr. Katherine Ann Mazzio from the HZB Institute of Nanospectroscopy received a prize for her poster. The conference is the world's largest symposium on thermoelectric materials.
The poster entitled "Hybrid Polymer/Nanoparticle Composites for High-Performance Thermoelectrics" presents a new process developed by the HZB team for the synthesis of hybrid thermoelectric materials. "We are actively pursuing hybrid thermoelectric materials from inorganic nanostructures in conductive polymer matrices for room temperature applications," explains Katherine Ann Mazzio. "In this paper we manipulated the stoichiometry of Ag2-xTe nanocrystals coated with the conductive polymer PEDOT:PSS and followed how changes in stoichiometry influenced structure/property relationships.
The presented work was performed in close collaboration with Danny Kojda and Britta Ryll from Klaus Habicht’s group at HZB. Katherine Ann Mazzio is a post-doctoral research associate, head of the thermoelectrics working group in the Institute for Nanospectroscopy and head of the chemistry and off-synchrotron analytics laboratories at EMIL.
- 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.