Have you ever noticed how frustrating it is when the power goes out and the batteries in your flashlight are dead?
Batteries are crucial in our daily lives, used in everything from our phones to our cars.
But over time, they slowly lose their ability to store and provide energy, a problem known as degradation.
Now, thanks to a $600,000 Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, Professor Yayuan Liu is trying to figure out why this happens.
Professor Liu works at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and plans to use this award to explore the mysteries of battery degradation.
The challenge is that the chemical processes inside a battery that cause degradation are very temporary and hard to capture. That’s why she is turning to a technique called fluorescence microscopy, which uses a very intense light source to study the problem.
Fluorescence microscopy is usually used in biology, but Liu thinks it could be the perfect tool for studying batteries too.
She will use the award money to support students who are developing this new method of investigating batteries.
“The exciting thing about fluorescence microscopy is that it allows us to detect a single molecule giving off visible light and can be used without causing any damage to the battery,” said Liu. “It’s like being able to watch everything happening inside a battery as it operates.”
Interestingly, Professor Liu noticed a surprising similarity between the cells in a battery and those in our bodies.
She hopes that her research will not only help us understand batteries better but also create new links between the studies of life science and material science.
If successful, this innovative approach could be used to answer other unanswered questions in electrochemistry.
“I’m pretty excited about it,” she said, adding that the Beckman Foundation funds projects that are high-risk but could also lead to groundbreaking discoveries.
She concluded, “Dr. Beckman has a legacy of developing new methods, tools, and instruments to advance scientific discovery,” and she hopes to continue that legacy with her project.
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