YIN excursion to the Helmholtz Institute Ulm

The Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU), as part of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has been jointly founded in 2011 by the KIT, the University of Ulm, the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW), and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to concentrate their highly complementary competences in the field of electrochemical energy storage. In 2014, the building was inaugurated and since then the HIU has become one of the worldwide leading research institutions in this field, covering basically every electrochemical energy storage technology that is of present importance and potential future impact. Since the inception of CELEST this work is being put onto a new strong research platform that bundles the energy storage related activities across these partners in Baden-Württemberg.

Three YIN members are located at the HIU:

The group of Dr. Dominic Bresser has been established in 2016 after his two-years postdoctoral stay at CEA in Grenoble, France, with a particular focus on alternative anode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Since then, the activities of the group have continuously expanded – including essentially every aspect of lithium-ion and lithium-metal batteries, but also next-generation energy storage technologies such as sodium-ion and organic (polymer) batteries.

The very recently established group of JProf. Helge Stein researches on the intersection of fundamental electrochemical research, automation, engineering, and machine learning to accelerate materials discovery and optimization. Research activities revolve around the use of scanning droplet cell electrochemistry to synthesize tailored solid electrolyte interphases and probe their electrochemical, structural, electronic, and compositional properties through high throughput spectroscopy (XPS, Raman, FTIR). To proliferate highly integrated autonomous feedback loops the group develops its own data management pipelines, orchestration and data analysis frameworks.

The group of Dr. Roswitha Zeis is investigating the performance losses in high-temperature polymer electrolyte fuel cells and redox flow batteries. Starting from different levels, we investigate technically relevant systems: the individual cells and their components up to electrochemical structural studies on model electrodes. This project aims to develop a deeper understanding of reaction processes occurring in these cells and to use this knowledge to develop more powerful cells.