Prof. Steve G. Greenbaum (Hunter College Of The City University Of New York) Monday 27th May 2019, 13:00 Institute Of Macromolecular Chemistry CAS Heyrovského Nám. 2, Prague 6

All major automobile companies will cease manufacturing internal combustion-powered vehicles within a timeframe measured in years rather than decades. The need for mitigating “range anxiety” without sacrificing safety presents a major challenge to present-day lithium ion technology, which has nearly reached its physical limit in energy density. New chemistries with correspondingly new materials are needed for the next generation of batteries. Replacing the graphite negative electrode with Li metal or Si/Li alloy and using low- (or zero-) cobalt cathodes are leading strategies. Sulfur-based cathodes are also under consideration. The major bottleneck in all of these current and proposed developments is the lack of a suitable electrolyte needed to eliminate the flammable liquid carbonate electrolyte solvents in use today. Among replacement candidates are low molecular mass polyethers (i.e. glymes), ionic liquids (ILs), inorganic solid electrolytes including glassy sulfides and garnet-type, and polymer electrolytes.

Prof. Steve Greenbaum is CUNY Distinguished Professor of Physics at Hunter College (New York) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He earned his PhD in Physics from Brown University, was a postdoc in the Semiconductors Branch at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and spent sabbatical years as a Fulbright Scholar at the Weizmann Institute and Senior Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was a member of the team that designed the lithium ion batteries for the successful Mars Rover missions. He was Visiting Professor at several universities including Stony Brook, Rutgers, Tel Aviv, Paris-Sud, Padova, and Rome Sapienza. Dr. Greenbaum studies disordered solids by magnetic resonance and synchrotron x-ray absorption, and has co-authored over 270 peer-reviewed publications. He was a Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. State Department in 2014-15.

Registration: free, please, register by sending email to Petr Šálek (salek@imc.cas.cz).