Crystal Structure Design

Materials play an important role in energy storage and carbon capture. Particularly, energy storage is indispensable for efficient use of renewable energy and finding better materials for energy storage has long been hot research topics. Moreover, since carbon capture is crucial to achieve carbon negative mission, it becomes increasingly important to discover adsorbents that largely absorb CO2 into its body as well as the catalysts that catalyze the reactions of CO2.

However, existing materials are far from perfect. Taking Lithium-ion batteries as the specific example. Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere in our life. Beyond wide usage on smart phones, laptops and cars, they have been increasingly used in the grid storage system. However, to build such system, the energy density and security are still essential issues. To be more specific, the battery consists of cathode, electrolyte and anode. Cathode plays the role of absorbing Li-ions in the discharge process and emitting Li-ions in the charge process. Discovering new cathode materials to meet the density and security requirements is one of the most important topics. Especially under the megatrend of replacing the liquid electrolyte with the solid one, the choice of cathode materials is quite a different story.