Mid-year symposium wrap up

More than 85 participants from academia and industry attended storEnergy’s mid-year symposium in person at Deakin University. The full day program included informative and engaging presentations by the invited speakers, and excellent presentations from storEnergy researchers.

The day was opened by CIC EnergiGUNE’s Scientific Director, Prof. Michel Armand who gave a fascinating talk about recent progress in polymer electrolytes and their use in solid-state batteries. This was then followed by Ionic Industries’ Managing Director, Simon Savage who spoke about supporting collaborative research projects between academia and industry. The industrial theme was then continued by Industry Advisor and storEnergy’s Board Chair, Dr. Leonie Walsh, who gave an interesting talk about her experience of working with startups.

Following a lunch and poster break filled with many thought-provoking discussions, Prof. David Officer (University of Wollongong) continued the talks by speaking about edge functionalised graphene and its energy applications. This was then followed by Prof. Zaiping Guo (University of Adelaide) who gave a fascinating talk about advanced cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. StorEnergy researchers then got a chance to share some of their research with Dr. Federico Vallana (Deakin University) speaking about his work developing acesulfamate based electrolytes. This was then followed by PhD students Anna Warrington (Deakin University) and Bodie Fuler (University of South Australia), who spoke about ether functionalised ionic liquids for lithium-ion batteries and understanding lithium-ion battery failure in remote settings, respectively.

After a quick break, the talks from storEnergy PhD students continued with Jinsha Liao (University of Melbourne) speaking about continuum simulations of nanoconfined ion transport in electrodes. This was followed by Azra Sourjah (Deakin University) who shared her work on developing organic ionic plastic crystals for battery electrolytes, Mohammad Kahrizi (Deakin University) who spoke about developing ionic liquid electrolytes specifically for high capacity silicon/graphite composite anodes, Jasreet Kaur (Queensland University of Technology) who talked about graphitic anodes developed from biowaste and Anto Varghese (Deakin University) who shared his research on using block copolymer based ionogels as electrolytes for supercapacitors. Finally, the symposium was finished off by Prof. Senentxu Lanceros-Menedez (BCMaterials) who joined the conference from Spain, with a fascinating talk about printable energy storage systems.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to making the day such a success.