Curious Mind Award for Michelle Browne
Michelle Browne (2. f. l.) receives the Curious Mind Award. © Tamina-Florentine Zuch for manager magazin
On Thursday, 12 October 2023, Michelle Browne received a prestigious award in Hamburg: The "Curious Mind Award" in the category "Mobility, Energy and Sustainable Business" by manager magazin.
The young chemist is researching novel material systems as catalysts for green hydrogen through electrolysis. Among other achievements, Michelle Browne has designed a larger electrolysis cell that can be produced using a 3D printer. This device allows to examine many processes under more realistic conditions than with the tiny “shot-glass” cells commonly used in the laboratory. The print data is available in open access, benefiting research groups worldwide.
Michelle Browne completed her PhD at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. After postdoctoral positions in Belfast, Prague and London, she is now building up her own research group at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. For her innovative research, she was also awarded the “L’Oréal-and Unesco Women in Science – Rising talents” Award 2021. manager magazin will publish a feature and a video on Michelle Browne and her work.
- Iridium-free catalysts for acid water electrolysis investigatedHydrogen will play an important role, both as a fuel and as a raw material for industry. However, in order to produce relevant quantities of hydrogen, water electrolysis must become feasible on a multi-gigawatt scale. One bottleneck is the catalysts required, with iridium in particular being an extremely rare element. An international collaboration has therefore investigated iridium-free catalysts for acidic water electrolysis based on the element cobalt. Through investigations with various methods, among them experiments at the LiXEdrom at the BESSY II X-ray source in Berlin, they were able to elucidate processes that take place during water electrolysis in a cobalt-iron-lead oxide material as the anode. The study is published in Nature Energy.
- 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.