Plastics Sustainable materials for the industry

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FAULHABER Drive Systems

Machine builders and component manufacturers are increasingly focusing on reducing their own CO₂ footprint. Therefore, one step is to use recycled or renewable raw materials in the products. We present three manufacturers with plastic solutions.

University of Ulm: Research on organic electrode materials

Many electrical devices contain batteries and the demand is increasing. Therefore, new energy storage solutions are needed. With her project "Nano Batt", Prof. Birgit Esser wants to research a fundamentally new concept for organic electrode materials (OEM). For this, she has received funding of two million euros over five years from the European Research Council (ERC).

"The field of OEM is significantly less explored compared to inorganic materials for batteries," says Esser. The problem: Existing OEMs have insufficient porosity, which hinders the diffusion of counter ions to electro-active sites or makes redox processes, i.e., the simultaneous release or uptake of electrons, irreversible. This severely limits their performance and applicability.

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To improve the porosity of organic materials, Esser uses so-called redox-active, conjugated nano-rings with "Nano Batt". These are ring-shaped molecules whose electrons do not reside at a fixed point, but move within the tire. "This could be an advantage and stabilize the charge," explains the chemist. "Nano Batt" aims to produce such nano-rings, the synthesis of which is sometimes very complex.

The basis for this will be chemicals such as quinones or azines, which are currently obtained from petroleum, for example. "In the long term, one can look at whether renewable resources can be used for this," says Esser. The challenge is to store as much charge as possible on as little molecule as possible. Because: "In an ideal world, you want a battery that weighs as little as possible and has a lot of storage capacity," says Esser. This is another reason why high porosity is important: It enables thicker electrodes, which lead to a higher capacity.

To see if the porosity is improved, the "Nano Batt" also aims to establish methods to actually measure the effect in conjunction with other materials in batteries.