Dr. Michael J. Aziz seminar

Seminar title "Aqueous Organic Flow Batteries for Massive Electrical Energy Storage"

Abstract:
The ability to store large amounts of electrical energy is of increasing importance with the growing fraction of electricity generation from intermittent renewable sources such as wind and solar. Flow batteries show promise because the designer can independently scale the power (electrode area) and energy (arbitrarily large storage volume) components of the system by maintaining all electro-active species in fluids. Wide-scale utilization of flow batteries is limited by the abundance and cost of these materials. We have developed an approach to electricity storage in flow batteries using the aqueous redox chemistry of small, potentially inexpensive organic and organometallic molecules. This new approach may enable massive electrical energy storage at greatly reduced cost.

Bio:
Michael J. Aziz is the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His recent research interests include novel materials and processes for electrical energy storage and CO₂ capture and sequestration. He is co-inventor of the organic aqueous flow battery and directs multi-investigator research programs on stationary electrical energy storage. He is a Fellow of the APS, the MRS and the AAAS and is the co-recipient of the 2019 Energy Frontiers Prize from Eni. He was the faculty coordinator for the Harvard University Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment from 2009 to 2019, for which he developed a quantitative course on energy technology for a group of students in diverse disciplines. He is authoring a textbook, “A First Course on Energy Technology: Depletable and Renewable Resources, Interconversion, and End Usage”