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Suh, Changwon

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Changwon

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Suh, Changwon

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2014 - 20153

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.4d026434-1b61-4973-b8a7-0c22babf1843

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    A metal-free organic–inorganic aqueous flow battery
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2014) Huskinson, Brian Thomas; Marshak, Michael; Suh, Changwon; Er, Suleyman; Gerhardt, Michael; Galvin, Cooper J.; Chen, Xudong; Aspuru-Guzik, Alan; Gordon, Roy; Aziz, Michael
    As the fraction of electricity generation from intermittent renewable sources—such as solar or wind—grows, the ability to store large amounts of electrical energy is of increasing importance. Solid-electrode batteries maintain discharge at peak power for far too short a time to fully regulate wind or solar power output\(^{1, 2}\). In contrast, flow batteries can independently scale the power (electrode area) and energy (arbitrarily large storage volume) components of the system by maintaining all of the electro-active species in fluid form\(^{3, 4, 5}\). Wide-scale utilization of flow batteries is, however, limited by the abundance and cost of these materials, particularly those using redox-active metals and precious-metal electrocatalysts\(^{6, 7}\). Here we describe a class of energy storage materials that exploits the favourable chemical and electrochemical properties of a family of molecules known as quinones. The example we demonstrate is a metal-free flow battery based on the redox chemistry of 9,10-anthraquinone-2,7-disulphonic acid (AQDS). AQDS undergoes extremely rapid and reversible two-electron two-proton reduction on a glassy carbon electrode in sulphuric acid. An aqueous flow battery with inexpensive carbon electrodes, combining the quinone/hydroquinone couple with the \(Br_2/Br^-\) redox couple, yields a peak galvanic power density exceeding 0.6 W cm^{−2} at 1.3 A cm^{−2}. Cycling of this quinone–bromide flow battery showed >99 per cent storage capacity retention per cycle. The organic anthraquinone species can be synthesized from inexpensive commodity chemicals\(^8\). This organic approach permits tuning of important properties such as the reduction potential and solubility by adding functional groups: for example, we demonstrate that the addition of two hydroxy groups to AQDS increases the open circuit potential of the cell by 11% and we describe a pathway for further increases in cell voltage. The use of π-aromatic redox-active organic molecules instead of redox-active metals represents a new and promising direction for realizing massive electrical energy storage at greatly reduced cost.
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    What Is High-Throughput Virtual Screening? A Perspective from Organic Materials Discovery
    (Annual Reviews, 2015) Pyzer-Knapp, Edward O.; Suh, Changwon; Gómez-Bombarelli, Rafael; Aguilera-Iparraguirre, Jorge; Aspuru-Guzik, Alan
    A philosophy for defining what constitutes a virtual high-throughput screen is discussed, and the choices that influence decisions at each stage of the computational funnel are investigated, including an in-depth discussion of the generation of molecular libraries. Additionally, we provide advice on the storing, analysis, and visualization of data on the basis of extensive experience in our research group.
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    Publication
    Computational design of molecules for an all-quinone redox flow battery
    (Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), 2015) Er, Suleyman; Suh, Changwon; Marshak, Michael; Aspuru-Guzik, Alan
    Inspired by the electron transfer properties of quinones in biological systems, we recently showed that quinones are also very promising electroactive materials for stationary energy storage applications. Due to the practically infinite chemical space of organic molecules, the discovery of additional quinones or other redox-active organic molecules for energy storage applications is an open field of inquiry. Here, we introduce a high-throughput computational screening approach that we applied to an accelerated study of a total of 1710 quinone (Q) and hydroquinone (QH2) (i.e., two-electron two-proton) redox couples. We identified the promising candidates for both the negative and positive sides of organic-based aqueous flow batteries, thus enabling an all-quinone battery. To further aid the development of additional interesting electroactive small molecules we also provide emerging quantitative structure-property relationships.