Achievement

Trainee Veronica Augustyn and her mentor Bruce Dunn recently published in Nature Materials (Nature Materials, 12 (2013) 518-522) a paper that demonstrates a new "intercalation pseudocapacitance" phenomenon. This discovery blurs the line between what is a battery and what is a supercapacitor. The niobium oxide material has the potential to be a key part of a storage device with high capability for both rapid storage and release of energy. This work was in collaboration with Veronica's colleagues at Cornell University and Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France. It shows a fundamentally different ion transport mechanism in pseudocapacitive material that has been investigated by this research community before. This work is further honored by Department of Energy as Veronica is one of Graduate Student Invited Speakers at the 2013 Energy Frontier Research Center Annual Principal Investigator Meeting.