#SusEnergy - Sustainable materials for energy storage and conversion

Technologically relevant electrochemical devices such as fuel cells or batteries still rely either on high loadings of precious metals (e.g. Pt, Ir) or the use of unsustainable materials like graphite anodes or cobalt-containing cathodes. Beside costs, these critical raw materials (CRM) need ideally to be replaced, reduced in their content or recycled to reach sustainability. The predicted future growth in battery production leads to an urge in finding sustainable solutions, while second use and recycling is also targeted. The growing efforts to utilize hydrogen in alternative energy grids also call for sustainable materials in energy conversion, since wide application will need to rely on abundant elements. Sodium ion batteries hold promise to allow improved sustainability and recent progress has led to first commercial products. In energy conversion, the most promising class of sustainable and CRM-free electrocatalysts is the group of atomically dispersed M-N-Cs. Despite large recent progress, further optimization to reach competitive performance and stability is needed.

This symposium shall be a platform for exchange and discussing recent progress in the field of sustainable materials for energy storage and conversion applications with a focus on sodium ion batteries and PEM fuel cell, however open to related employment of electrode materials.

• Na ion battery materials
• M-N-C Catalysts
• Electrolysis catalysts
• In-situ diagnostics of electrodes
• Performance optimization