Laisuo Su
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Materials Science
Grid-scale energy storage needs batteries that are cheap, safe and built from abundant materials, and zinc-ion batteries fit that description better than lithium ones: they can run on water-based electrolytes and zinc is plentiful. What holds them back is what happens at and near the zinc metal surface.
- Fields
Materials Science
Chemistry
Engineering
- Topics
zinc-ion batteries
aqueous electrolytes
molecular crowding
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Determine how the chemistry and concentration of non-reactive crowding agents and zinc salts modulate the Zn2+ solvation shell, ion pairing, and ion transport in bulk aqueous electrolytes.
- Track how interfacial solvation structures and zinc deposition evolve under operating electrochemical conditions, using in-situ Raman and FTIR spectroscopy and synchrotron X-ray scattering (SAXS and pair distribution function analysis).
- Evaluate the electrochemical stability of molecularly crowded electrolytes and their compatibility with high-voltage cathodes in full zinc-ion cells.
- Build composition-structure-property relationships by combining spectroscopy, electrochemical testing and molecular dynamics simulations, to test whether crowding suppresses side reactions and improves reversibility of zinc plating and stripping.
More about the research
Zinc tends to plate unevenly into dendrites, needle-like growths that short out a cell; electrodes degrade; and the water in the electrolyte reacts when it should not. This project tackles those problems by redesigning the liquid rather than the electrodes, borrowing an idea from biology called molecular crowding — in living cells, large inert macromolecules take up so much space that they change how small molecules are solvated and move.
Why it matters
Storing electricity at grid scale is a bottleneck for wind and solar power, and zinc-ion batteries offer a safer, lower-cost, abundant-materials route if dendrite growth and electrolyte instability can be controlled. Understanding how molecular crowding reshapes zinc-ion solvation could guide the design of electrolytes that make these batteries more efficient and longer lived, and the same design rules may carry over to other aqueous and multivalent energy storage chemistries.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anh Ngo
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Materials Science
Characterize the solvation structure of liquid battery electrolytes, meaning how molecules arrange around each ion, across many compositions and concentrations using high-throughput multimodal measurements.
Feifei Shi
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Chemistry·Early-career
Characterize electrical double layer properties in lithium-ion battery electrolytes by electrocapillarity on a static mercury electrode, measuring interfacial free energy, ion surface excess and potential of zero charge.
Ekaterina Pomerantseva
Drexel University, PA·Materials Science
Test whether chemically preintercalating ions between the layers of MXene-derived bilayered vanadium oxide widens the interlayer spacing and speeds up zinc ion movement in aqueous zinc-ion battery cathodes.
The school
University of Texas at Dallas: 16 labs on PI Pages, $182M a year on research, 239 research doctorates a year.
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