Congratulations to Madison Tuttle, Ph.D. candidate of The Zhang Research Group. She is being honored as one of OSU's Next Generation Innovator of the Year finalists!

"The Next Generation Innovator of the Year award is open to postdocs along with undergraduate and graduate students. The award recognizes innovation and entrepreneurship that has contributed to the development or commercialization of a new technology. It may also recognize a trainee-initiated start-up company whose success is a result of entrepreneurial talent, creativity and energy."

A note from Madison about her research: 

"As burning fossil fuels for energy represents the largest source of CO₂ emissions worldwide, replacing them with clean, renewable energy sources would be a major step toward reaching global net-zero carbon emissions and mitigating climate change. Due to the natural variability of wind, solar, and hydropower, the development of large-scale energy storage systems is essential for transitioning to a clean energy economy. Conventional energy storage systems such as Li-ion batteries have high storage capacities and long lifetimes, but their use in large-scale applications is limited by the high cost and low abundance of metal electrode materials and the potential safety hazards of flammable electrolytes.

My innovation is the development of low-cost organic electrode materials that can operate in water-based electrolytes for large-scale renewable energy storage systems that are more sustainable and safer than Li-ion. Because traditionally water-compatible organic electrode materials like oxygen-based quinones or nitrogen-based phenazines can be expensive to synthesize and often have very low operating voltages, we aimed to design a new high-voltage, sulfur-based organic electrode material by repurposing an inexpensive industrial lubricant additive in collaboration with Lubrizol Corp. Together, we were able to uncover key relationships between molecular structure and battery performance, and demonstrate the viability of our sulfur-based organic electrode materials in both redox flow and Zn-ion batteries, two promising large-scale energy storage systems. Importantly, our work establishes a new research direction for the design of water-compatible high-voltage organic electrode materials, resulting in two provisional patents and one scientific publication."