New paper published in Chemical Communications on the synthesis and electrochemical application of titania-loaded carbon spherogels. This work continues our collaboration on spherogels with many scientists, foremost with Michael Elsaesser (see his website www.carbon-spherogels.com)

We have several contributions to the 29th ISE Topical Meeting Energy and water: electrochemistry in securing the sustainable society development. On April 19th, Yuan Zhang is giving an oral presentation on “Sub-nanometer carbon confinement: pore size effect on ion permselectivity and selectivity”. On April 21st, Volker Presser is giving an oral presentation on “Beyond the double-layer: charge-transfer processes for high-performance desalination batteries”. Also, Stefanie Arnold is giving an oral poster presentation on “Antimony alloying electrode for high-performance sodium removal: how to use a battery material not stable in aqueous media for saline water remediation”.

Welcome new Postdoc Dr. Qingsong Wang! Having obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and worked at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Institute of Nanotechnology, he will be working on MXene and other next-generation electrode materials.

Welcome visiting Ph.D. student Antonio Gentile! Antonio is from University of Milano-Bicocca (group of Riccardo Ruffo) and will be working in the coming six months on MXene electrode systems.

New paper published in Chemical Engineering Journal on the correlation of ion size / hydrated ion / pore size of sub-1-nm carbon pores. The work was done in collaboration with the team of Guang Feng (HUST, China). The work demonstrates how ion selectivity in mixed ionic systems cannot reliably be predicted by single-salt baseline testing. Also, we demonstrate the importance of durability testing since effects such as ion sieving may very well vary and change over time.

Welcome new Ph.D. student Yunjie Li! Having done her Master at Shandong University, Yunjie will be doing her Ph.D. study with us on lithium-ion batteries.