CPOS Seminar: "Charges in Organic Redox Flow Batteries and Immiscible Polymer Blends"

Speaker: Katie Chung, Postdoctoral Researcher, Craig Hawker Group (UCSB)

Stabilization of charges and spins is fundamental to enhancing the lifetime of functional organic materials, particularly for long-term energy storage in multi-redox organic redox flow batteries. Current approaches are limited to the incorporation of electronic substituents to increase or decrease the overall electron density or bulky substituents to sterically shield reactive sites. Herein we introduce regioisomerism as a scaffold-diversifying design element that significantly enhances the H-cell and flow battery capacity retention of two new classes of 2e^– catholytes. We anticipate regioisomeric engineering to be a promising strategy complementary to conventional electronic and steric approaches for multicharge and spin stabilization in other functional organic materials.

Compatibilization of post-consumer immiscible plastic waste could incentivize recycling of mixed plastic waste. Conventional approaches like block co-polymer compatibilization often requires backbone-specific block co-polymers, hence limiting the generalizability of the approach. We thereby introduce an ionic compatibilization strategy through C-H insertion into post-consumer immiscible polymer mixtures (eg. polyolefins and polystyrene) that can effectively compatibilize the polymers and yield blends that exhibit superior thermomechanical properties relative to the unfunctionalized blends. It is anticipated that this backbone-agnostic compatibilization strategy can be applied to a wide range of polymers with distinctive properties.