Dr. Xiulei "David" Ji, the Bert and Emelyn Christensen Professor of Chemistry at Oregon State University, will give a seminar titled "From Ion Charge Carriers in Storage Batteries to a New Family of Cathodes for High-Energy Power Batteries" to the interested faculty and students at the Discovery Park.

Abstract

Over the past thirteen years, my research has sought scalable, low-cost battery chemistries for energy storage by navigating through the landscape of ion charge carriers. The chemistry of storage batteries has not yet been settled, and their feasibility must be explored by pushing the boundaries of existing battery designs. Our work began with investigations of sodium and potassium storage in carbon anodes for non-aqueous batteries and later expanded to aqueous systems employing charge carriers such as protons, ammonium, iron, and zinc.

In aqueous batteries, we uncovered fundamental correlations between solvation structures and the thermodynamic reactivity of water in electrolytes, as well as engineering approaches to passivate metal anode surfaces for extended cycle life. We have enjoyed revealing new and often unexpected chemical properties of water. In parallel, we learned that anions play critical roles in enabling unconventional and highly reversible electrode reactions. Building on these insights, our focus has shifted to anions as charge carriers and redox centers. A recent effort involves integrating small oxyanions directly as active mass within electrode composites to enhance energy density. This evolution marks our transition from ion-carrier-centric research to electrode-centric design, as we now explore new composite cathodes that challenge the status quo of the Li-ion and Na-ion battery industry.

Bio

Prof. Xiulei “David” Ji is the Bert and Emelyn Christensen Professor of Chemistry at Oregon State University. His research focuses on devising new electrochemical reactions for high-performance and low-cost energy storage. Prof. Ji has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by the Web of Science Group each year since 2019, with over 47,000 citations and an H-index of 98 (Google Scholar). He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2016 and has been named a Scialog Fellow by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of Carbon Energy (Wiley). Prof. Ji earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry from Jilin University in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Waterloo in 2009. From 2010 to 2012, he was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.