Wide-scale storage is currently the Holy Grail of researchers designing energy-storage solutions for clean energy, and scientists at Stanford University have come closer to achieving it with a new mathematical model for designing materials.
The work—conducted by researchers in the university’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences—also could help researchers build batteries that last longer in smaller form factors, said Daniel Tartakovsky, a professor in the school and one of the leaders of the work.
“If you could engineer a material with a far superior storage capacity than what we have today, then you could dramatically improve the performance of batteries,” he said.
Tartakovsky described the model—which works with nanoporous materials, the materials widely used to develop energy storage—and how it works to Design News . These materials look solid to the human eye but contain microscopic holes that give them unique properties.
“The model connects pore characteristics of a nanoporous material, e.g., its pore structure, and operating conditions to the material’s macroscopic properties of interest, e.g., electrolyte diffusion or electric capacitance,” he explained. “This connection is then used to optimize these macroscopic properties by using the pore characteristics as decision variables.”
Until now, working with nanoporous materials has been a matter of trial and error, but the model gives materials scientists more predictability in their work, Tartakovsky said.
“We developed a model that would allow materials chemists to know what to expect in terms of performance if the grains are arranged in a certain way, without going through these experiments,” he said. “The model provides a systematic alternative to the currently used ‘trial-and-error’ strategy for materials development, which could dramatically accelerate discovery of nanoporous metamaterials with superior energy-storage characteristics.”
Indeed, by using the model, researchers can “significantly speed up design of nanoporous metamaterials with superior energy-storage characteristics, such as electrolyte diffusion or electric capacitance,” Tartakovsky said.
Tartakovsky and fellow researchers published a study on their work in the journal Applied Physics Letters .
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