Fall 2018 Seminar Series - 111918 Helms

THE CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK 

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT

PRESENTS

Doctor Brett Helms 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Monday, November 19, 2018

Seminar will be held in ST-160 (Lecture Hall) at 2:00 PM

Reception will be held in Steinman Hall, Exhibit Room from 3:15 – 4:00 PM

Diversity-Oriented Approaches to Tailoring Ion-Selective Polymer Membranes for Aqueous and Non-Aqueous Electrochemical Devices

Low-Cost and ion-selective membranes are required to meet the growing demands for peak performance by next-generation batteries for EVs, aviation, and the grid. To that end, I will showcase a highly disruptive membrane platform based on polymers of intrinsic microporosity, whose pores are on the length scale of solvated ions and small molecules that are sometimes used as the battery’s active materials (e.g., as in flow batteries). The design space for these polymer membranes is advanced using a variety of computational tools, including computational materials genomics. The foundational knowledge built using these tools provides a roadmap for the diversity-oriented synthetic development of polymer membranes with specific pore architectures and chemistry, specifically tailored for the battery’s chemistry. Iwillalsooutlinefoundationsonwhichtobuildadaptive membranes, where judiciously placed molecularswitches allow for the membrane’s transport properties to be modulatedin-situin response to excursions that are otherwise detrimental to the battery’s cycle-life. Thereremainsmuchtobelearnedabouttheoriginsoftheiradaptiveanddynamicproperties, andhowthesefeedbackacrossmultiplelengthandtimescales in the electrochemical cell.