Thomas Barthelay

Helped to run the AAPS exhibition stand at the Cenex LCV event at Millbrook proving ground with other members of the AAPS CDT and management team. This event also offered a range of seminars covering topics such as increasing levels of autonomy, decarbonisation, and vehicle to grid technologies.

I have attended a wide range of conferences and talks from the Cenex LCV – Connected Automotive Mobility to a DL_POLY, atomic modelling seminar. I find the courses on specific programmes and software’s incredibly useful for helping me with my PhD as gives me the tools I need to complete my work and in cases where it cannot, show me where I am able to obtain the information I need to advance my research. I also enjoy the conferences with a broader theme as these help me contextualise the work I am doing and see the bigger picture. These give me the opportunity to learn more about what other researchers are doing and develop ideas from their work that I could use in my own research. Unfortunately, these have all been online so far and therefore has lacked the socialising that would usually take places at these events. However, by being online, I am able to attend certain conferences that I would never usually be able to visit as they may be in a different country.

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IWES is a workshop aimed at battery scientists and engineers working in battery technologies and provides a comprehensive insight into all the different aspects of battery energy storage. This is a great way to not only learn more about what is going on in my research space, but also get a glimpse at what work is being undertaken in the wider battery community.

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The Battery Cells & Systems Expo was aimed at bringing together companies all parts of the supply chain for electric batteries, showcasing any new and exciting developments to solve the numerous problems across the board. This was a real top-to-bottom exhibition, from new battery chemistries to full electric vehicle manufacturing techniques. This was an opportunity to see where my research can fit in with the wider Battery Electric Vehicle network and start to think about how my research would affect those working around me.

This seminar was a training event for the DL_POLY software that conducts very small scale but very accurate atomistic simulations, called Density Functional Theory (DFT). The seminar was tailored for those only just starting in DFT and went through the theory behind the simulations into enough depth to get a basic understanding of how the DL_POLY software calculates different parameters of atoms in certain structures.

To mark the end of the MRes year, the cohort presented posters on the work they completed throughout the Innovation and Evaluation Units

Battery2030+ is a look into the future of battery chemistries and how development of new materials an architecture can solve some of the fundamental problems with a growing energy storage market. One of the main focuses was on utilising more sustainable materials for batteries, such as sodium and zinc. A spotlight was also shone on the poor recyclability of current batteries and what potential avenues could be researched in greater depth to resolve this problem. This was a great chance to see some emerging technologies, right at the cutting edge of a growing market and made start to think about bringing some of the ideas into my own research.

Title of talk: Structural Batteries and their applications

AAPS Conference 2022