Abstract: Cobalt, nickel, and lithium are essential ingredients in today’s lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), but their continued use presents certain challenges. Society must now begin to consider the implications of a LIB’s full life cycle, including the carbon footprint, the economic and environmental costs, and material availability. These challenges motivate the case for degradable or recyclable batteries sourced from earth-abundant materials whose life cycle bears minimal impact on the environment. This presentation considers organic polymer-based batteries, which have the potential to address many of these issues. Redox-active polymers form the positive and negative electrodes, storing charge through a reversible redox mechanism. We demonstrate how these polymer electrodes can be degraded on command or else recycled, offering the promise of a circular platform free of critical elements. The nature of charge transfer in the organic electrode is also probed using electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring, showing the mixed transfer of ions, electrons, and solvent. Taken together, this work shows that organic batteries are within reach with improvements to their performance.

Bio: Lutkenhaus is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research at Texas A&M University. She has 200+ peer-reviewed publications on polyelectrolyte complexes, structural energy & power, organic radical polymer batteries, and functional coatings. She has received funding from NSF, AFOSR, DOE-BES, ACS PRF, and the Welch Foundation. Lutkenhaus is recognized for her expertise in the thermal behavior and water effects of polyelectrolyte complexes, redox mechanisms in polymer electrodes, and composites for high stiffness batteries. She is the Deputy Editor of ACS Applied Polymer Materials, as well as a member of the U.S. National Academies Board of Chemical Science & Technology and U.S. National Committee for IUPAC.