Concept illustration of ions
and electrons migrating
in a sodium-ion battery.
Raphaële Clément seeks
to develop the battery and
improve the “suitability of
nuclear magnetic resonance
for looking at more complex
systems.”
14 Spring 2022
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The deployment of sodium-ion batteries, which func- ... charge reversibly, that is, taking up sodium ions and elec-.
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Concept illustration of ions and electrons migrating in a sodium-ion battery. Raphaële Clément seeks to develop the battery and improve the “suitability of nuclear magnetic resonance for looking at more complex systems.”
14 Spring 2022
L
ithium (Li) is the active ingredient in rechargeable batteries that power today’s smart phones, laptops, and electric vehicles, but lithium’s increasing scarcity and associated high price have led researchers to search for other, more abundant elements to replace it. Many researchers have turned to sodium (Na), which is below lithium in the periodic table and, accordingly, shares many of its properties. Sodium is also nearly 1,200 times more available in the world than lithium, making it far more af- fordable to extract and purify. The deployment of sodium-ion batteries, which func- tion through shuttling of sodium ions and electrons back and forth between the battery’s electrodes upon charge and discharge, has been hampered by a lack of cathode materials that are capable of storing large amounts of charge reversibly, that is, taking up sodium ions and elec- trons during discharge of the battery and releasing them, so that they can be returned to the anode material, as the battery is recharged. “Viable sodium alternatives to current lithium-based batteries have proven elusive, partly because a limited number of sodium-ion cathode materials have been tested to date,” says Raphaële Clément, an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Materials Department. She recently re- ceived an Early CAREER Award, the most prestigious prize given by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to sup- port early-career faculty, providing her lab with more than $700,000 over five years to pursue research and education- al activities related to developing a sodium-ion battery. To find the missing cathode materials, Clément, who joined the UCSB Materials Department in 2018 after earning her PhD in chemistry from the University of Cam- bridge, proposes to study a new class of transition metal fluorides that hold promise for use in high-energy-density sodium-ion cathodes. These compounds — derivatives of Na 2 MgAlF 7 , a mineral known as weberite and named after the nineteenth-century Danish merchant who discovered it — radically depart from systems that have been explored previously for lithium. Clément will focus her search on we- berite-like materials containing Earth-abundant elements, including fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminum, manga- nese, and iron. As part of the project, titled “High-Resolution NMR for Paramagnetic Sodium Electrodes,” researchers in Clé- ment’s lab will explore the new materials at a fundamental level, seeking to understand the links between their chem- istry, atomic structure, and electrochemical performance. They plan to achieve this by using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a powerful technique that makes it possible to analyze the atomic structure of a material by tracking interactions between nuclear and electronic spins — tiny bar magnets associated with atomic nuclei and electrons — when the material is placed in a powerful magnetic field. NMR allows scientists to study the charge-discharge processes in battery materials. “When a battery is operating, you have two materials [one in the anode and the other in the cathode] that can store sodium ions. On discharge, sodium ions are extracted from the anode material and then travel through a liquid electrolyte to be inserted into the cathode material. The
Raphaële Clément pursues
a novel alternative to
lithium-ion batteries
Raphaële Clément aims to develop a sodium-ion battery and new NMR techniques.
the
SODIUM
SOLUTION
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