Guest Seminar - Chemistries and Technologies for Next-Generation Aqueous Batteries
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Aqueous batteries are attractive for their inherent safety, low cost, and sustainability, yet remain limited by narrow electrochemical stability windows and unresolved degradation mechanisms. This seminar introduces recent progress in understanding and overcoming these challenges through advanced diagnostics and autonomous experimentation. Online acoustic emission (AE) sensing has been applied as a nondestructive technique to identify chemomechanical degradation in TiS₂-based aqueous cells, revealing distinct signal signatures for particle fracture and hydrogen evolution. Next, a closed-loop electrolyte discovery platform, ODACell 2, will be presented, which integrates automated coin-cell assembly, electrochemical testing, and Bayesian optimization. The system successfully identifies organic-aqueous hybrid electrolytes for LiFePO4 || Li4Ti5O12 full-cells within 100 iterations that achieve > 94 % Coulombic efficiency while mitigating gas evolution. Together, these app! roaches offer a pathway toward high-performance, stable aqueous batteries through the convergence of sensing, automation, and data-driven design.
Dr. Leiting Zhang is an assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry - Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, Sweden. He received his PhD degree in 2018 from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in joint supervision with the Collège de France. Dr. Zhang’s main research interests include mechanistic understanding of (non)aqueous batteries, development and application of operando sensing techniques, and machine learning-assisted lab automation. He is the “Future Research Leader” from the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation, and the recipient of the Royal Academy of Sciences (Uppsala) Bergstedt Prize, the 2025 Göran Gustafsson Prize for Young Researchers, the 2025 ACS Rising Star in Materials Science, and the finalist for the 2024 ACS Energy Lectureship (early career).