Electrochemical energy storage applications are growing at an unprecedented rate on multiple scales. These include smart card batteries, large-scale electric vehicle batteries, and warehouse-sized redox flow batteries. While much progress has been made, energy storage materials that are higher performing, more versatile, smaller, lighter, and most importantly, more environmentally viable, will be required in the future. With these goals in mind, our group is working on improving a variety of organic-based energy storage systems, such as lithium-ion and aqueous zinc-ion batteries. We leverage fundamental synthetic strategies to design novel small molecules and polymers with improved properties, which we can test in the lab by incorporating our materials into devices. Recent developments include work on ultra-high capacity anodes and on mixed conductor binders.
