Invited Talk: Redox-active Polymers for Organic Batteries

Cobalt, nickel, and lithium are essential ingredients in today's lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), but their continued use presents economic, ethical, and environmental 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 access. 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 degradeable and recyclable organic batteries, with special attention to insights from the field polymer physics. We next demonstrate a collaborative effort in which polymer design can be accelerated using simulation and data science. The presentation closes with insights into low-temperature batteries, for which redox-active polymers are especially well-suited.