Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

We Canadians, and indeed all the people in the world are at a crossroad. Over the coming years, planned massive investments will allow society to be increasingly supported by renewable energies like solar, and more importantly for Canadians, wind. These abundant nonpolluting energies will require a society wide transformation known as electrification where electricity is used in virtually all energy requiring endeavors. The caveat of this remarkable future is that we need to develop an ability to store electric energy on a massive scale, since production is not linked to demand, i.e. the wind blows independently of our energy needs. Our research program's long-term vision is therefore to develop batteries that combine power performance and long operational lifetime with low financial and environmental costs. To this end, we focus on developing models as well as testing new architectures based on molecular building blocks. A groundbreaking advance, that could potentially be the outcome of this proposal is the development of numerical models with high fidelity. These models would prove invaluable in virtual "what-if" battery design and longevity predictions. To reach this lofty goal requires high fidelity input parameters that should become available as two major new analytical techniques mature from this proposal. An advance of potentially similar importance would be the development of efficient molecular based batteries. This is due the facts that they can be based on (bio) renewables, they may be used with other more readily available ions than Li, and they have significant processing flexibility. To advance towards this objective, we propose a set of unique molecular structures that combine conductive polymers with high voltage charge storage molecules. Overall, the proposed work serves arguably the most important energy policy changes of the last 25 years, by providing new science and highly trained personnel to Canada's battery industry that is directly tied to our successful society wide electrification.