Monday, October 31, at 12:20 p.m. in Todd 334
The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering is hosting a seminar presented by Venkateshkumar Prabhakaran, Physical Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA.
Venkateshkumar Prabhakaran received his B.S. in chemical and electrochemical engineering from the Central Electrochemical Research Institute, India in 2009 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology under Vijay Ramani in 2014. During his Ph.D, he investigated chemical degradation kinetics and mitigation strategies in polymer electrolyte fuel cells using in-situ fluorescence spectroscopy. He is now a postdoctoral research associate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His current research interests focus on (i) the preparation of novel electrode materials using soft and reactive landing of ions for various electrochemical technologies (ii) development of in-situ and in-operando techniques to gain fundamental understanding of electrochemical processes at well-defined electrode-electrolyte interfaces prepared with soft-landed ions, and (iii) multimodal electrochemical imaging coupled with spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. He authored 19 peer-reviewed articles (publications in Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) are notable) and presented at 15 conferences.
Rational Design of Electrode-electrolyte Interfaces for Solid-state Energy Storage using Ion Soft Landing
The development of improved materials for efficient energy storage is at the forefront of applied energy-related research. At the same time, the rational design of improved electrode-electrolyte interfaces (EEI) for energy storage is critically dependent on a molecular-level understanding of ionic interactions and nanoscale phenomena. The presence of non-redox active species at EEI has been shown to strongly influence Faradaic efficiency and long-term operational stability during energy storage processes. Soft landing of mass-selected ions is ideally suited for depositing monodisperse, pure, electrochemically active ions on electrodes with a specific charge state, composition, and kinetic energy. In this seminar, I will describe our recent application of soft-landing towards the design and characterization of highly active EEIs: (i) by complete elimination of strongly coordinating non-redox species through SL, we achieve substantially higher efficiency and stability for EEI prepared with highly-dispersed discrete redox-active polyoxometalate anions (PMo12O403-) in solid-state redox-supercapacitors, (ii) by development of in-situ solid state electrochemical probes to characterize EEI populated with precisely-defined electroactive species using soft-landing. In this context, soft-landing is established as a versatile method for the controlled design of novel surfaces for both fundamental and applied energy research.
