Battery materials for sustainable energy storage: Tracking structure and disorder in working batteries

Batteries are central to the green transition, but their continued development depends on materials that are both high-performing and based on sustainable and abundant resources. In this lecture, I will introduce some of the key materials challenges in rechargeable batteries, with a focus on electrode materials for sodium-ion batteries as a possible complement to lithium-ion technology.

A central question in our research is how battery materials behave during operation: What structural changes occur at the nano- and stomic-scale during the redox processes and how does this relate to the performance of the battery? To answer this, we combine electrochemical analysis with operando diffraction, scattering, and spectroscopy methods. In the lecture, I will show examples from our recent work on iron-based sodium-ion battery electrodes, where local atomic structure and disorder in otherwise crystalline materials play a decisive role for electrochemical performance. 

BIO
Dorthe Bomholdt Ravnsbæk is a Professor of Materials Chemistry and the Director of the Center for Sustainable Energy Materials (CENSEMAT) at the Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University, Denmark. 

She obtained her Ph.D. in Nanotechnology from Aarhus University in 2011 and subsequently held a postdoctoral position Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA) until 2014. Before returning to Aarhus University as Professor in 2021, she was Assistant and later Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. 

Her research revolves around developing sustainable energy materials, and for more than 13 years, she has worked in the field of rechargeable batteries, particularly on developing and understanding electrode materials through advanced atomic and nano-scale characterization using operando and synchrotron-based methods for studying structural changes during electrochemical processes in real time.