Susan Jean Babinec | |
|---|---|
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| Alma mater | University of Wisconsin |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | United States Department of Energy Dow Chemical Company Argonne National Laboratory |
Susan Jean Babinec is an American scientist. She is Program Lead for Stationary Storage within the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) at the Argonne National Laboratory. She looks to develop a future electric grid for the United States.
Babinec completed a degree in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. [1]
Babinec spent the first twenty years of her career at Dow Chemical Company, where she worked as a senior electrochemist. [2] She was honored as Inventor of the Year, and the first woman corporate fellow. [2] At Dow, Babinec worked on cathode electrodes for lithium-ion batteries. She investigated how the binder and porosity of the electrodes impacted the electrochemical and mechanical properties. [3] She co-invented a low cost display technology that became a venture-funded start-up.[ citation needed ] She became frustrated by Dow's lack of investment in new technologies, and moved to A123, a company who were pursuing new battery materials. [1] When A123 found a defect in one of their batteries, they were forced to recall products, which resulted in the company going bankrupt. [1]
Babinec joined the United States Department of Energy ARPA-E program that looked to support energy projects. [1] During her six years at ARPA-E, Babinec invested $120 million into battery companies, including Natron Energy, Sila Nanotechnologies and Ion Storage Systems. [1]
In 2019, Babinec was appointed to Argonne National Laboratory's grid energy storage program. [4] [5] She looks to optimize energy storage capabilities by integrating grid design with industry needs. [4] To better understand battery materials, she developed rapid life cycle evaluations and pioneered the use of artificial intelligence. [6] She launched the Battery Data Genome project, a challenge to collect, store and share usable information from every stage of the battery lifecycle. [7] [8] The Battery Data Genome Project looks to transform understanding about electric vehicles. [9] [10]
Babinec is an athlete, and has played[ clarification needed ] competitively since her time at college. [11] She is married with two adult sons.
Argonne National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UChicago Argonne LLC of the University of Chicago. The facility is the largest national laboratory in the Midwest.
A rechargeable battery, storage battery, or secondary cell, is a type of electrical battery which can be charged, discharged into a load, and recharged many times, as opposed to a disposable or primary battery, which is supplied fully charged and discarded after use. It is composed of one or more electrochemical cells. The term "accumulator" is used as it accumulates and stores energy through a reversible electrochemical reaction. Rechargeable batteries are produced in many different shapes and sizes, ranging from button cells to megawatt systems connected to stabilize an electrical distribution network. Several different combinations of electrode materials and electrolytes are used, including lead–acid, zinc–air, nickel–cadmium (NiCd), nickel–metal hydride (NiMH), lithium-ion (Li-ion), lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4), and lithium-ion polymer.
A zinc-bromine battery is a rechargeable battery system that uses the reaction between zinc metal and bromine to produce electric current, with an electrolyte composed of an aqueous solution of zinc bromide. Zinc has long been used as the negative electrode of primary cells. It is a widely available, relatively inexpensive metal. It is rather stable in contact with neutral and alkaline aqueous solutions. For this reason, it is used today in zinc–carbon and alkaline primaries.
Molten-salt batteries are a class of battery that uses molten salts as an electrolyte and offers both a high energy density and a high power density. Traditional non-rechargeable thermal batteries can be stored in their solid state at room temperature for long periods of time before being activated by heating. Rechargeable liquid-metal batteries are used for industrial power backup, special electric vehiclesand for grid energy storage, to balance out intermittent renewable power sources such as solar panels and wind turbines.
Nanobatteries are fabricated batteries employing technology at the nanoscale, particles that measure less than 100 nanometers or 10−7 meters. These batteries may be nano in size or may use nanotechnology in a macro scale battery. Nanoscale batteries can be combined to function as a macrobattery such as within a nanopore battery.
A123 Systems, LLC, a subsidiary of the Chinese Wanxiang Group Holdings, is a developer and manufacturer of lithium iron phosphate batteries and energy storage systems.
ARPA-E, or Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy is a United States government agency tasked with promoting and funding research and development of advanced energy technologies. It is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Michael Makepeace Thackeray is a South African chemist and battery materials researcher. He is mainly known for his work on electrochemically active cathode materials. In the mid-1980s he co-discovered the manganese oxide spinel family of cathodes for lithium ion batteries while working in the lab of John Goodenough at the University of Oxford. In 1998, while at Argonne National Laboratory, he led a team that first reported the NMC cathode technology. Patent protection around the concept and materials were first issued in 2005 to Argonne National Laboratory to a team with Thackeray, Khalil Amine, Jaekook Kim, and Christopher Johnson. The reported invention is now widely used in consumer electronics and electric vehicles.
Jean-Marie Tarascon FRSC is Professor of Chemistry at the Collège de France in Paris and Director of the French Research Network on Electrochemical Energy Storage (RS2E).
A battery energy storage system (BESS) or battery storage power station is a type of energy storage technology that uses a group of batteries to store electrical energy. Battery storage is the fastest responding dispatchable source of power on electric grids, and it is used to stabilise those grids, as battery storage can transition from standby to full power in under a second to deal with grid contingencies.
George William Crabtree was an American physicist known for his highly cited research on superconducting materials and, since 2012, for his directorship of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) at Argonne National Laboratory.
Linda Faye Nazar is a Senior Canada Research Chair in Solid State Materials and Distinguished Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo. She develops materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion. Nazar demonstrated that interwoven composites could be used to improve the energy density of lithium–sulphur batteries. She was awarded the 2019 Chemical Institute of Canada Medal.
Ying Shirley Meng is a Singaporean-American materials scientist and academic. She is a professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) chief scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. Meng is the author and co-author of more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapter and six patents. She serves on the executive committee for battery division at the Electrochemical Society and she is the Editor-in-Chief for MRS Energy & Sustainability.
Paul Fenter is a senior physicist and leader for Interfacial Processes Group, in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the former director of the Center for Electrochemical Energy Science (CEES), a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.
Khalil Amine is a materials scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, an Argonne distinguished fellow, and group leader of the Battery Technology group. His research team is focused on the development of advanced battery systems for transportation applications. In addition to his Argonne appointment, he is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Hanyang University, and Peking University.
Amy Prieto is a Professor of Chemistry at Colorado State University and the Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Prieto Battery.
Kristin Aslaug Persson is a Swedish/Icelandic American physicist and chemist. She was born in Lund, Sweden, in 1971, to Eva Haettner-Aurelius and Einar Benedikt Olafsson. She is a faculty senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Between 2020-2024, she served as the director of the Molecular Foundry, a national user facility managed by the US Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Persson is the director and founder of the Materials Project, a multi-national effort to compute the properties of all inorganic materials. Her research group focuses on the data-driven computational design and prediction of new materials for clean energy production and storage applications. In 2024, Persson was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in the class of Chemistry.
Karim Zaghib is an Algerian-Canadian electrochemist and materials scientist known for his contributions to the field of energy storage and conversion. He is currently Professor of Chemical and Materials Engineering at Concordia University. As former director of research at Hydro-Québec, he helped to make it the world’s first company to use lithium iron phosphate in cathodes, and to develop natural graphite and nanotitanate anodes.
Kelsey Hatzell is an American materials scientist who is a professor at Princeton University. Hatzell studies new materials for sustainable technologies, with a focus on next-generation energy storage. She is interested in the nanoscale phenomena responsible for battery failure.