(light music)
- Welcome to PNNL.
I'm in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory
and in the specific lab that I'm in,
we're studying fundamental processes
of energy storage materials,
such as catalysts and batteries.
These are materials that can help decarbonize
the U.S. energy infrastructure.
For batteries, we're trying to understand
how to make them higher energy density
so that you can take your electric car even further
on a single charge.
My colleague, Sam Johnson, will talk about catalysts,
but to make sure that we're on the same page,
I'd like you to think about the catalytic converter
in an internal combustion engine.
The catalysts in those catalytic converters
help to reduce emissions that cause smog,
and PNNL has played a critical role
in developing those catalysts.
Specifically, the catalysts in the Dodge common diesels
running down the road today were developed at PNNL.
And what I love about that story
is that it started with a fundamental understanding
of those catalysts,
understanding that we can obtain in a lab
such as the one that I'm in.
The instrument behind me is unique in North America
and it's going to allow us to study energy storage materials
at a much more detailed level.
The problem with energy storage materials
is that the features that can direct how they function
and also how they fail are often very rare
within the material.
The result is that it can take years to even decades
with a standard piece of equipment
to be able to see them.
The instrument behind me has the potential
to reduce that time to days, to even hours,
so that we can see things that we literally
could not see before.
We're interested in understanding
several different properties of these materials.
One is how the atom-by-atom structure is oriented
relative to each other,
so how are the atoms placed relevant to each other
and how does that control how the material works?
We're also trying to understand interfaces.
The interface between a solid and a liquid
or a solid and a gas behave very differently
than a bulk solution or a bulk material,
and understanding how those differences dictate performance
becomes critical in making the materials
more and more efficient.
One of the things PNNL is known for
is to understand and study these materials
under actual operating conditions,
such as high pressure and high temperature.
The equipment to study these often isn't sold commercially,
and so we have to build them ourselves.
I have here an example of a piece of equipment
that we built ourselves.
This is called a probe and it goes inside
of the piece of equipment behind me.
We're able to use high temperature and high pressure
to study things like catalysts and batteries
so that we're able to look at them
under actual operating conditions,
so we have a better idea of how they're going to function
when they're deployed into technology.
Sometimes we're just not able to do an experiment.
It might take too long or the technical capabilities
that we have just don't exist yet.
And so, we complement our studies
with computational studies to help fill in some of the gaps
from our experimental studies.
- The instruments you see behind me
are frequently used by my collaborators
to characterize and understand molecules and materials.
These capabilities and the collaborations
that have come with them are a big part
of why I joined PNNL as a postdoctoral researcher.
I'm a computational chemist,
so my primary tool is a computer.
However, these types of instruments
frequently inform our models.
I work on net zero carbon energy sources,
energy storage, and the molecules
that make these transformations possible.
These molecules called catalysts and batteries
are a big part of our energy landscape.
I study the fundamentals of these catalysts.
How do their atoms move and how are bonds made and broken?
The idea is that if we can understand these fundamentals,
we can make better catalysts,
catalysts that are safer, faster,
and more energy-efficient.
I don't do this work alone, however.
I work as a big team of scientists ranging
from high school students, to graduate students,
to other postdoctoral researchers,
to staff scientists like myself and beyond.
We also work frequently with universities.
Catalysts are a huge part of reaching the goal
of decarbonizing energy.
And so, they have lots of applications within that space,
including improving vehicle emissions,
converting plastics into useful materials,
helping us mitigate the plastic waste problem.
We also use catalysts in order to make the fuels
of the future.
For example, PNNL and LanzaJet have partnered
to make aviation fuels from industrial waste gases,
effectively turning trash into useful materials.
A flight was even completed using these types of fuels.
I use Metalysis in studying
how we can store solar energy in fuels.
We can think about storing this energy over time.
Perhaps you store in the summer
and then harvest in the winter.
Or we think about storing geographically.
Maybe we store sunlight in a really sunny place,
like Richland, Washington,
and then transport it to a less sunny place
where people can use it.
Biological catalysts, called enzymes,
are often better than man-made catalysts
at doing these transformations
at reasonable temperatures and pressures.
Therefore, we spend a lot of time studying these enzymes
in order to understand how they work
so that one, we can apply these lessons
in making better man-made catalysts, but two,
so that we can also incorporate these enzymes
into our energy landscape.
One place where enzymes are better than man-made catalysts
in terms of achieving low-temperature reactions
is in the field of making fertilizers.
Making fertilizers may seem more like a problem
for the Department of Agriculture.
However, it's a huge energy problem.
It turns out that the process of making fertilizers
consumes one to 4% of the globe's energy each year.
That's a huge amount of energy.
And if we can reclaim some of that,
that would mean a lot of energy saved.
Enzymes are able to do this transformation
at low temperatures and low pressures,
so we try to study how these enzymes operate
so that we can learn from them.
If we wanna study them computationally, however,
this can be really complicated.
Enzymes are really big, they have a lot of moving parts,
as well as having metal centers
that can be difficult to simulate
for traditional computational methods.
Therefore, PNNL is invested in the energy technologies
of the future, one of which is quantum computing.
Quantum computing may help us simulate
the centers of these enzymes better
than traditional methods.
Then, we'll combine what we learned from quantum computing
with traditional computing and experiment
in order to better understand and then apply lessons
from enzymes to man-made catalysts.
- Thank you for joining us on the tour today.
I hope you enjoyed learning more about how we're working
to understand the fundamental properties
of energy storage materials.
(light electronic music continues)