Hello, and welcome to this episode of the
Physics World weekly podcast,
which is supported by American Elements.
I'm Hamish Johnston.
In this episode, I'm in conversation
with Colm O'Dwyer,
who is professor of chemical energy at University
College Cork in Ireland
and president of the Electrochemical
Society.
O'Dwyer talks about the role that electrochemistry
plays in the development of modern technologies,
including batteries,
semiconductor chips, and pharmaceuticals.
We also chat about the role that the
Electrochemical
Society plays in advancing the theory and practice
of electrochemistry
and solid state sciences.
We also speak about how electrochemists
collaborate
with scientists
and engineers
in other fields,
including physics.
This episode is supported by American Elements,
the world's leading manufacturer of engineered and advanced
materials.
American Elements is a long standing leader in
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serving in 2001
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Hi, Colm. Welcome to the podcast.
Hi, Hamish. Glad to be here. So, Colm,
you're the president of the Electrochemical
Society. Can you tell us a bit about
the organization?
Who who are its members? What are its
goals? What's it up to at the moment?
Oh, sure. The Electrochemical
Society
or ECS as as most people know it
as,
is a society of members and a professional
organization. It was founded way back in 1902.
So it's a 122
years old and counting, and it has a
primary mission. It has changed a little over
the years, but it's dedicated to advancing the
theory and practice of electrochemistry
and the solid state sciences and technologies. So
that's the mantra for the society's mission and
its overarching goal. It's headquartered in Pennington, New
Jersey in the US.
But we have a global community of over
8,000 members and tens of thousands of people
who interact with the society at meetings,
journal publications,
and lots more besides.
And the topical interest areas, that's what we
refer to them as. So there's 13 of
those.
And they define
the academic
and industry interface, the topics that the people
would come to meetings to hear talks about,
the topics that would be in the journals,
then and many of our online articles. And
these range from
batteries and fuel cells and electrochemical
energy storage and conversion technologies
through sensors, material sciences,
energy,
electronics,
solid state
chip making and solid state materials
and and the environment.
And it it the the society really is
a hub for
knowledge dissemination,
and that's how I really see it.
Both peer reviewed publications,
like the journal of the Electrochemical
Society is over a century old. It's very,
very well known among the community.
But the core
interaction with all of our members and with,
you know, the public is is our biannual
meetings.
So ECS would hold a spring meeting and
a fall or autumn meeting,
every single year, pretty much every year since
its inception.
And these are very, very well attended, and
that's our core way of bringing everyone in
the community together.
People working on semiconductors,
people working on batteries, and everything in between
all come together in the same place. And
we have an organizational
structure
with an executive committee and many members, and
it's all based on volunteer interaction. So it's
a a nonprofit society, and everyone like me,
colleagues,
and
organizers,
symposia,
and at all levels in society are all
volunteers from from universities and from industry.
I see. And, Carm, I want to ask
you specifically
about,
some of the applications of, electrochemistry
that you've mentioned.
It plays, electrochemistry
that is, plays crucial roles in modern technology,
particularly in the semiconductor
and energy storage
industries.
Can you talk a bit about how electrochemistry
is driving
innovation
in those key sectors. And and maybe, you
know, could you start with semiconductors?
Because
I, you know, I suppose as a physicist,
I wasn't really aware
of,
how much electrochemistry
is used in the semiconductor industries. So could
you talk a bit about that?
Sure.
Electrochemistry
as it as a really broad discipline
is
somewhat hidden behind
some of the processes that happen in all
of semiconductor manufacturing and in modification
and even synthesis of some semiconductor materials. But
it's there.
In classical
chip making,
electro deposition is a key process step.
And that's a that's a core technology and
process in in chip making and then semiconductor
processing and manufacturing. And that's essentially a purely
a classical electrochemical technique
where you have your semiconductor
or your substrate or whatever you want to
deposit on, whether it's patterned, whether it's not
in a solution
containing the the material that you'd eventually want
to deposit. And it's a classical Faraday type
process, and you can control how much of
the material is deposited on the surface
depending on the current you apply and how
long you apply it for.
And that is used in so many different
processes in
electrochemical methods and
techniques, but it's a core process in semiconductor
and manufacturing.
So was etching.
And so you can do etching and pattern
relief and formation within semiconductor processing
in lots of different
semiconductor
based technologies.
But one of the core etching techniques
is either chemical etching in solution,
or you can have electrochemical etching where you'd
like to control
the quality and the smoothness
of the etched features on a on a
very
complex
semiconductor process. And that can also be done,
electrochemically
in solutions.
You can't in in in the in the
realm of compound semiconductors,
then electrochemistry
is
is very interesting and and objectively important here
too.
For example, in solar photovoltaics,
a really good example where you have
binary compounds, ternary compounds, compounds containing 2, 3,
4, or more elements.
When they form their final crystal structure, they're
really active
photovoltaic materials,
and these can be grown using electrodeposition.
And electrochemical growth has this really nice advantage
that the fundamental idea is that the growth
will happen at the interface between one material
and another or between the material and the
substrate that you want to grow it on.
And there has to be an electrical connection
there. So there's charge transfer from
wire up the substrate
and connect it to whatever's happening in solution,
and the material will only grow
where the charge transfer is happening. So you
ensure that you can often have very clean
interfaces
between one material and another that you can
grow iteratively
using electro deposition and electrochemical growth. So it's
very useful for for those materials in solar
affordable takes. And I guess the other,
aspect or the fundamental aspect in
semiconductor processing is metallization.
Now these are for,
conductivity,
wiring within chips, interconnects, they're often referred to.
These are typically done using
vapor
phase methods. But there are ways of doing
it depending on the sizes
of the features or what type of device,
what type of chip you're making, where you
would like to be able to metallize using
electrochemical methods. And so that's often used,
also.
I see. And I suppose in in the
big one for, I suppose, someone like me
who's
naive about, about electrochemistry
is
batteries. And I mean, I'm guessing that a
battery is
is
an electrochemical
device, and lots of electrochemists
around the world are are working very hard
on coming up with
ways of improving batteries and developing new batteries.
So can you talk a bit about
battery research? I know I know it's a
huge field, but maybe if you could pick
out a few highlights at the moment,
that are of interest to electrochemists.
Right. So
at at the moment, it's probably one of
the
core examples of where electrochemistry has really, really
become more familiar to not just scientists outside
of electrochemistry, but to the public too.
And from the inception, I think it would
be the lithium ion battery
that would be the most familiar to
most. Electrochemistry
is the core
process that happens in these. So it's it's
a material science
concept where you have
a electrode that's a positive and electrode that's
negative, and then you have a liquid in
between,
and that forms essentially your your battery system.
To control this,
it's
a purely electrochemical process.
So you can drive
electrons into the battery when you want to
charge it up, and you can have electrons
extracted from the battery when you're discharging it.
So it's either a power source
or an energy storage source.
Lithium ion batteries have come a really long
way since the inception in the late seventies.
But in all of the research and development
that's happened, in parallel with the material science
people,
in parallel with the electrolyte liquid development
people,
everyone working in that space in the main
will use electrochemical
techniques to be able to test how the
battery works,
to prove how it works, to judge how
much energy it stores, what voltage it works
at, how fast you can charge and discharge
this. These are all analyzed using electrochemical techniques
because
they are electrochemical processes.
And it's becoming more and more familiar to
people. And one of the most interesting things
is to listen to people who drive electric
vehicles.
And
the conversations
with someone who buys an electric vehicle, they're
very aware more than I ever imagined. You
know, for someone who doesn't work in this
space in the lab or in industry,
what type of lithium ion battery chemistries exist.
Drivers of some vehicles are very aware of
lithium iron phosphate, which really threw me for
6. I didn't realize people talked about this
in everyday conversation.
They know about NMC batteries. They talk in
kilowatt hours, in kilowatts for charging rates, just
like people used to do for internal combustion
engines, and it's becoming more and more familiar
to people. But there's a lot still happening
in the research side.
Solid state batteries are being developed
really in earnest at the moment, and that's
one of the key developments. These
are slated at least in principle
to be liquid free
with a ceramic type electrolyte between the 2
electrode materials.
They give a high energy density and they're
very lightweight.
You have sodium ion technologies.
They're the sister battery to to lithium ion.
People looking at magnesium ion, zinc air, lithium
sulfur. There's a whole plethora of different
chemistries,
all of which use materials that are probably
more sustainable,
but all of them
need electrochemistry
to understand how they operate,
what goes on inside the system, and electrochemical
methods then to benchmark them and actually work
out how they perform relative to one another
in terms of their applications. So would they
be
a smartwatch type battery chemistry,
or would it be something like a grid
storage buffer type large scale battery, or would
it be a electric vehicle type battery?
Each one has a specific type of internal,
material set requirement,
but they're all electrochemical
energy storage systems
and analyzed using exactly those techniques.
So can can we move, CALM, beyond chips
and energy, which are obviously 2 huge
sectors, industrial sectors. And and maybe can I
ask you to talk about some other technologies
that benefit from advances
in electrochemistry?
I know of I know of some,
outside of the outside of the semiconductor
electrochemistry,
chip manufacturing and batteries, I move into areas
where I'm not so in-depth knowledgeable at all.
But there are some of them that are
really interesting.
One of them, which was a surprise, but
it's it's it's growing
quite a lot, is the use of electric
chemistry in the basic synthesis of organic compounds
in pharmaceuticals.
And so classically, these would have been there's
always a charge
transfer between species when you have chemical reactions
happening.
But what I'm beginning to see is more
more activity in
in using electrochemistry
to control how those reactions happen
and to form organic compounds in a much
faster, much more efficient way in ways that
you need,
you know,
certain types of catalyst to help those process
happen. They can be overcome using electrochemical techniques
because you're bringing
outside power and energy into the system
using current and voltage rather than just using,
for example,
a active or a passive catalyst inside your
chemical reaction. So I find that very interesting,
and I think that will grow in the
use of electrochemistry in in organic
and compound synthesis.
Environmental sensors are another
where we see with colleagues and in in
other projects where electrochemical techniques
are critical
for looking at and developing
new sensors and how they work. So not
just carbon capture, but being able to very
efficiently
measure,
the particulates in the air, nondestructively,
repeatably,
and using very, very cheap but very well
controlled system. These tend to be,
electrochemical
in nature. There's water and food security. So
water treatment
using electrochemical
tags for
food security,
longevity,
assessing whether food is safe or not due
to the electrochemical
detection of certain compounds that remitted from food
as it ages.
And these can all be developed as very,
very,
low cost
and tags,
on food product labels, for example. So that's
really interesting.
But then, of course, you have solar and
green fuel production.
So in developing
hydrogen for the hydrogen economy
as fuel for fuel cells and for many
more applications,
that is an adaption of
simple electrolysis, so splitting of water into hydrogen
and oxygen.
And that classically is an electrochemical type process.
You need energy, so you can take it
from this on.
You can apply a voltage. You can apply
a current. But when you do the voltage
and current and you tackle this problem electrochemically,
you've lots of control.
The rate at which you form the electrolysis,
you can develop materials
that do it much more efficiently, but you
can quantify it electrochemically.
And there's also the possibility too of of
electrochemical,
fertilizer
synthesis.
So really low cost, high volume production of,
fertilizers for agriculture.
And and these can be done by sequestering
gases and other minerals
and forming those compounds,
from electrochemistry
too. It's really interesting, some of these techniques.
It's interesting in a sense that electrochemistry
is driving new ways of looking
at solutions to, you know, problems like this,
creating new products and allowing a way of
analyzing and and and quantifying them.
But they're kind of in all of their
developments, they're really joined at the hip
with other technologies and industries.
So, you know, the it a surge
in electrochemistry
and its application
will always need,
you know, developments in in the chip manufacturing,
and other industries that they're eventually going to
be, you know,
products from these technologies would need.
I see. And and I was hoping now
that we could talk a bit about your
own research.
You have a particular interest in developing
analytical techniques
for the non destructive testing
of batteries
and other electrochemical
systems.
Why is non destructive testing
necessary?
And and what what techniques are you developing?
We we look at a very at a
small part of the of the the bigger
need, I guess.
And part of it is to look at
what happens inside a battery material or indeed
any material.
It doesn't have to be a battery one,
but we look at these because they're they
change
under,
use.
But the basis was to develop a nondestructive
method. So whether you use optics, whether you
use ultrasonics,
or whether you use x rays,
all the different
energies
up across the electromagnetic spectrum,
are typically
are are are being investigated now to see
what happens to these materials
when they when they operate.
And one of the needs is to pin
down
what
really happens
to lithium ion batteries, to give one example,
during their operation.
So if we were to take an electric
vehicle application, for example, so the battery structure
is very well defined.
They know what materials are in it. They
know how to put it together, and it's
developed in a particular type of form factor,
often like a cylinder type battery.
And 100 of these are placed within a
pack and put on the bottom of a
of electric vehicle.
Now
when you operate one of these in Malaysia
and you operate one of these in Northern
Canada,
different requirements happen for the same battery chemistry.
Someone is constantly charging and discharging their cells
in extreme cold, The other in a high
humidity warmer environment.
And people would like to know exactly, you
know, what causes degradation long term.
Is it the voltage? Is it the supercharging?
Is it the temperature?
Are there even materials used in the manufacture
of batteries that are over the long term
causing some degradation?
And one of the ways to look at
this is to do bring that system into
the lab and do it nondestructively
because you'll never find the solution by
opening up the battery and looking at it
afterwards.
They're such a reactive system
that as soon as you pull them apart,
they're no longer
working together.
They're extremely reactive.
And you can get some information from
analyzing the materials,
the composition,
what they were like afterwards compared to before,
but you get a lot more information by
watching what actually happens to the material,
the chemistry, the interfaces, and everything. When you
can
get that information at the same time, you're
watching the electrochemical charging and discharging behavior, and
you can link one to the other during
their operation.
And so this is becoming very interesting. A
lot of, developments
are in the optic space.
So between photonic crystals to,
fiber optics where people are using,
fiber optics inbuilt into the battery cell. So
it monitors the state of charge,
the overall state of health,
changes to the composition of the material,
the electrolytes,
the liquids inside, and doing that nondestructively
optically
at any time that they want.
There's techniques like CT scanning that you would
use in hospitals, for example.
So a CT scan that people would use
for biological system to analyze
or treat,
wounds or growths or whatever medical condition. Like,
you can treat a battery as as that
too. Look at its
state of health.
And
people are using x-ray and CT systems to
look at the material,
the interfaces,
and again, to just get an assessment of
what's happening to the material
at different length scales. So you have high
energy systems looking at very small features,
and you have lower energy systems looking at
the entire battery cell to see, does it
maintain its structure?
Everything from sound waves to X rays are
being used now for for what they call
operando measurements.
Just taking data
on a system that's behaving as it would
in the wild in a sense.
I see. And you're you're mentioning those
myriad
different techniques,
brings me on to my next question very,
very nicely.
So modern science is a collaborative
endeavor.
Can you talk about how electrochemists
are working with physicists,
material scientists,
biologists, and
and other
researchers to advance knowledge?
Well, if you if you were to look
at if you were to look at,
any,
I guess,
modern
technological device from a from anything from electric
vehicle to a phone. A phone will be
a good example, so I'll use this one.
Between the materials,
even organic polymer materials and everything that you
could use in an OLED or an AMOLED
screen for the latest, you know, phones and
smartwatches
through to the chips that are being developed
specifically
for
the use application in handheld device like that.
The battery developments to give you high energy
for a long time at extremely lightweight
and form factors that allow you to be
creative with the shape of the phone.
The materials on the outside, the interconnectivity,
the software, the low power Bluetooth, all the
things that run-in any typical device needs
now more than it ever did before. Everyone
from,
semiconductor physicists looking at display materials.
You have an semiconductor chip manufacturing
in the processing of this, the software development,
the material scientists
in everything from the outer casing to the
screen,
to the components and the chips, and especially
too in the batteries because that's a critical
component now for making everything
mobile
and wireless.
And
even with biologists too, so bioelectrochemical
systems,
especially sensors.
That's growing a lot now where you want
to have,
on skin, sometimes in vitro systems that have
their own power sources.
They can measure,
biological
activity in real time, whether it's electrochemically or
whether it's computationally through semiconductors.
These are being developed, but it's it's so
collaborative now that you can you, in the
main, find
electrochemists, physicists, material sciences, biologists, and more all
working on elements of a single device. And
this is becoming more and more common
as we're beginning to see mobility from
battery and energy storage technologies
mixing with
the semiconductor
industry
for the processing and allowing the device to
actually do what it's supposed to do. And
and, Colm, we've talked a lot about applications,
I suppose, but I wanted to also ask
you about
fundamental
research in electrochemistry.
What are some of the hot topics that
you and your
colleagues are,
are excited about at the moment,
in terms of fundamental work?
Well, in in in some of that I'm
I'm that I'm aware of,
but not working in, but I've I've I've
read some really interesting studies on where
electrochemistry
to some degree is being used.
The most obvious one are in next generation
batteries and the motivation for doing this,
like beyond lithium ion, as we move to
solid state solving the problems of the, of
the solid state batteries.
So getting them to be
industrially viable so you can actually manufacture. There's
lots
of interest in developing the material science, but
also understanding
the fundamental electrochemistry
that happens in a solid material compared to
a liquid material
and how you can get those batteries to
to work.
Sodium ion systems are also electrochemically very interesting.
Started
actually decades ago too,
just a few years after the lithium ion
system.
And it too has its own teething problems
that need to be solved both from material
science, but also from the electrochemical understanding of
why one material behaves in one way with
sodium,
but so differently than the same material behaves
with lithium.
And why exactly that is, and how you
exploit it and improve it.
And beyond that, there are,
redox flow batteries or another form of batteries
which are
not as well known, I guess, among the
public,
but they are a very, very large scale
energy storage system.
So to give you an example here, this
is an electrochemical process also,
but it uses reduction
and oxidation processes in 2 huge vats of
liquid. So you can
imagine a water storage facility where you have
100 and 100 of 1000 of liters.
And these types of batteries would store the
energy for an island community, for example.
And they could be transported on ships, and
the electrolyte is just flushed out of 1
tank, and a fresh one is replaced.
And an entire Ireland or an island culture
could exist on completely green electrochemical battery storage
technology that you just need to replace liquids.
It's very, very efficient.
C o two mediation, I think fertilizer production
and controlling contaminants in the atmosphere. But fertilizer
production
is
necessary for agriculture, but it's so important for
our entire existence.
Food production, the quality of soils,
measuring these, developing
very green sustainable fertilizer production from electrochemical processes
rather than pure chemical processes.
That's, I think, not just very interesting from
a fundamental electrochemical
point of view, but it's extremely important.
But some of the more,
esoteric or at least early stage fundamental blue
sky,
work in electrochemistry,
there's interfaces between liquids where you can grow
biological species. You can grow photoactive species at
the interface between 2 liquids completely from electrochemical
needs.
And then you have bioelectrochemistry
interactions, which I find very interesting,
especially when you mix it with automation
and discovery.
So there are,
people working in,
chemical synthesis for using artificial intelligence
and robots
to do
what it would take 100 and 100 of
chemists
over thousands of hours to do in just
a fraction of the time. So they're analyzing
the literature,
developing a synthetic process, and being able to
run
hundreds of parallel experiments all automatically
reproducing certain compounds and discovering
completely new ones without any human interaction.
This will eventually transition, I believe, to an
an electrochemical
synthesis and discovery where you now not just
mixing chemicals,
but the automated AI controlled robotic systems will
start to control the voltage and the current
just to give you those extra,
control variables for,
synthesis.
So that there there's some very interesting things
happening in in electrochemistry
outside of the fundamentals
that are, I guess,
the important underpinning to, you know, understanding for
the technologies that we're gonna develop.
I see. And so it sounds to me
like you're very positive
about the future
of electrochemistry.
I'm guessing that you would encourage
students to,
to sign up and do a degree in
chemistry and pursue
a career in electrochemistry?
Lots of opportunities?
There are. And what I really wish is
that, you know, as as someone who uses
electrochemistry,
on a daily basis, even for
even for studies that are not classically electrochemical.
You know, I mean, for batteries, but for
semiconductor
material. The electric it it's so fundamentally
useful.
But I think objectively important now given that
so much
between our our devices and wireless devices, but
also from an environmental perspective and the transition
to a greener, like, electric future.
Electrochemistry
is not just a sub
set of a chemical degree. It's becoming more
and more important.
And
short answer is yes. I definitely would with
the huge caveat is that
we still, in a lot of chemistry degrees,
do not have
a strong enough emphasis on
the electrochemical
part of those degrees.
So the I think there's room for for
looking at classical chemistry
degrees, looking at the area in which the
universities are based, seeing what industries are there,
and, you know, comparing to physics for which
for decades has
has had degrees which are not just called
physics.
You have applied physics degrees, you have industrial
physics degrees, you have
an astronomy and astrophysics purely
of of degrees in in some universities.
And I think, you know,
in in the US, you you you you
it's rarer to find a pure chemistry course
that doesn't have chemical engineering
or
biochemistry
in build with this. And I think, especially
in Europe,
there is a chance
to broaden,
the way we look at chemistry degrees and
and start to bring electrochemistry
as a core topic in undergraduate degrees where
it's very rarely done
with the level that I think it will
need for the future.
Well, that's great, Colin. Thanks so much for,
for coming on the podcast and talking about,
all things electrochemistry.
And,
we we wish you well
your tenure at the Electrochemical
Society as well. Thank you very much, Hamish.
It was really interesting to chat to you
about this.
I'm afraid that's all the time we have
for this week's podcast, which is supported by
American Elements.
Thanks to Colm O'Dwyer
for his insights into electrochemistry,
and thanks to our producer,
Fred Iles.
We'll be back again next week.