Vincent Battaglia

A team of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Argonne National Laboratory was recognized by FMC Corporation for the FMC Scientific Achievement Award, presented by Aaron Reichl, Director of Technology for FMC Minerals, and Marina Yakovleva, Global Technical Programs Manager. The team performed fundamental research on the lithium metal technology (SLMP^®) and helped identify methodologies for application of the stabilized lithium metal powder into high-energy lithium-ion batteries for consumer and transportation applications. This work is part of the Integrated Laboratories and Industry Research Program, supported by the Battery for Advanced Transportation Technologies Program of Vehicle Technologies Office of U.S. Department of Energy. 

The Berkeley lab awardees are Principal Investigators Gao Liu, Vincent Battaglia and Andrew M. Minor, as well as Postdocs: Zhihui Wang, Bin Xiang, Sang-Jae Park, and Lei Wang.

Gao Liu and his team developed a technology to boost the power storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries. The new material, for use in rechargeable batteries, can boost power storage capacity by 30 percent, a dramatic improvement in a field marked by little progress for more than a decade. It is called Conducting Polymer Binder, literally a kind of flexible plastic glue that holds electrode materials together while facilitating the shuttling of electrons and positively charged lithium ions.

Presented by R&D Magazine, the R&D 100 Awards recognize the year’s top 100 technology products from industry, academia, and government-sponsored research, ranging from chemistry to materials to biomedical breakthroughs.

Find out more about this technology at the links below.

In recognition of Outstanding Contributions to the Energy Storage Research and Development Portfolio.

"Conductive polymer binder based silicon composite anode for high-energy lithium-ion battery technology" has won Third Place in the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative's Innovation Expo Poster Competition at the 2012 BERC Energy Symposium Innovation Expo. This work is led by Environmental Energy Technologies Division scientist Gao Liu, with postdoc Shidi Xun, Mingyan Wu, and Sang-Jea Park in the BATT program in collaboration with Wanli Yang of the Advanced Light Source, Lin-Wang Wang of the Materials Sciences Division, and Vince Battaglia of EETD.

For a conductive polymer binder that significantly improves the performance of electrodes in silicon composite electrodes.

At the 14^th International Meeting on Lithium Ion Batteries in Tianjin, China in June, a poster titled "Particles and Binder Interaction in the Lithium-ion Cell Electrodes," was one of 12 posters that won "Most Excellent Poster Award" among 600 posters on lithium battery technology presented in this meeting. IMLB meeting is a major international conference on lithium battery technology. This is the only award presented at the conference.

The IMLB conference rotates among locations in Europe, Asian, and North American every two years.