Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The interest in sustainable development is at an all time high. This is in part due to the horrific realization that our current approach has left our environment, most notably, our climate in a disastrous state. Canada is therefore, like all industrial countries, in a ""green"" technology race to provide technologies that can sustain our way of life without destroying our environment. To compete in this race, researchers at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Clariant (Canada) inc. (formerly Phostech Lithium) have, over the past five years, formed a strategic alliance that targets practical solutions for next generation lithium-ion batteries - solutions that can cheaply and efficiently store renewable wind, solar and hydro energy. An important part of our strategic alliance is to provide the scientific data needed for sound engineering and business decisions. This NSERC-CRD application therefore targets developing a unified framework for characterizing and modeling of new lithium metal phosphate battery materials. We further propose to apply this framework to lithium iron manganese phosphates, as this system offers theoretically a significant improvement of energy storage capacity, without compromising the unique properties, such as low price, environmental benignity and safety, inherent to the existing lithium metal phosphate materials. The benefits to Canada are both strategic and economical. The economical benefits are closely related to the cutting edge research and training of a highly qualified workforce. These are key elements of our partner's completive advantage, and thus an important part of Canada bid for the highly expansive lithium-ion battery market, which by 2020 is expected to be worth 50-80 billion dollars. Strategically, the development of new and better batteries, especially for electric and hybrid electrical vehicles is in line with Canada's ""green"" energy initiatives. In fact, high performance batteries is the enabling technology that will permit Canada to use it's well developed hydroelectric and virtually untapped wind resources for car transportation.