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August 29, 2024

Researchers discover a surprising way to jump-start battery performance

Charging lithium-ion batteries at high currents just before they leave the factory is 30 times faster and increases battery lifespans by 50%, according to a study at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center. 

SLAC Press Release

Will C headshot
August 29, 2023

Will Chueh Receives 2023 David A. Shirley Award

His selection, by members of the ALS Users’ Executive Committee (UEC), recognizes Chueh’s deep contributions to operando soft x-ray spectromicroscopy for imaging electrochemical redox phenomena.

ALS Press Release 

September 13, 2023

‘Computer vision’ reveals unprecedented physical and chemical details of how a lithium-ion battery works

It lets researchers extract pixel-by-pixel information from nanoscale X-ray movies of electrode particles absorbing and releasing lithium ions. 

SLAC Press Release

Group Values

As a group, we always strive to maintain a friendly environment that supports diversity and inclusion. We believe that diversity in thought and experiences greatly benefits scientific discourse and our ability to do meaningful work. Furthermore, equity in education and access is an important facet of our group’s mission. The group is always looking for creative individuals and we welcome people of all races, ethnicities, religions, gender identities and sexual orientations.

From Will Chueh: “Creativity is one of the most important ingredients to doing impactful research. Being creative means to combine diverse points of view and to draw from wide-ranging personal experiences, both scientific and non-scientific ones. Being inclusive in all facets is the key to access these diverse perspectives. I believe working with a diverse group of students, postdocs, staff and faculty will fuel your creativity and deepen the impact of the research that you do. Creativity, diversity, and inclusion come hand in hand.”

Research Mission

The availability of low-cost but intermittent renewable electricity (e.g., derived from solar and wind) underscores the grand challenge to store and dispatch energy so that it is available when and where it is needed. Redox-active materials, both organic and inorganic, promise the efficient transformation between electrical, chemical, and thermal energy, and are at the heart of carbon-neutral energy cycles.

Understanding design rules that govern materials chemistry and architecture holds the key towards rationally optimizing technologies such as batteries, fuel cells, and electrolyzers. Lithium-ion batteries, for example, are transforming mobility through electric vehicles and electricity grid through the storage of intermittent renewables. Metrics such as energy density, lifetime and safety are controlled by phenomena that span enormous length scales, from individual atoms to full systems, and times scales, from picoseconds to decades. Despite the significant progress over the past three decades, we still lack a complete understanding of how each length and time scale connects to one another, and most importantly, controls the behavior of the device.

We seek to understand and engineer redox reactions at the levels of electrons, ions, molecules, particles and devices using a bottom-up approach. Our approach integrates novel synthesis, fabrication, characterization, modeling and analytics to understand molecular pathways and interfacial structure, and to bridge fundamentals to energy storage and conversion technologies by establishing new design rules.

While our focus and approach are fundamental, The Chueh group’s work paves the way towards achieving the following goals that underpin a sustainable future:

  • Develop energy technologies that utilize sustainably extracted materials that enables many-fold reduction in cost floor and in emissions

  • Accelerate the pace of research and development to bring new energy technologies to impactful scales faster and more economically

We have four scientific themes focused on characterizing, understanding and controlling redox-active solids.

 

The Chueh Lab

Materials Science and Engineering
Durand Building
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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