Future Days recap part 2: Battery and green hydrogen – Insights to power a sustainable future

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As you may have heard from our first recap, we had a wonderful time recently at our first-ever Future Days event! We organized this two-track online event to share insights on the future of two important fields: battery and green hydrogen technology, and 3D printing and additive manufacturing.

The event’s batteries track featured an exciting set of expert presentations and interviews. Our speakers explored the challenges and opportunities facing the batteries world, including green hydrogen, supply chains, and battery ageing. If you want to catch up, or if you couldn’t make it, we’ve got good news – we’re recapping each of the batteries talks below. Enjoy!

Tackling future challenges in the world of batteries

Prof. Dr. Egbert Figgemeier, Chair for Ageing Processes and Lifetime Prediction of Batteries at RWTH Aachen University, kicked off the event’s battery-related sessions with his talk, ‘Challenges in future battery designs’. He explored what the future might look like for battery technology, including challenges around design, aging and lifetime prediction, and battery-material supply chains. You can hear his perspective below.

Now, as we know at Malvern Panalytical, analyzing small particles is often the answer to big challenges! That’s what one of our principal scientists, Dr. Scott Speakman, dived into in the next session: ‘Battery: Morphological and structural characterization’. His presentation explained how important it is to characterize battery materials – morphologically, elementally, and structurally. In particular, in-operando characterization of battery cells can help us investigate the causes of battery degradation. Find out about this now!

Powering the green hydrogen economy

While the first two sessions gave a good idea about the challenges in battery design and how materials analysis can help to overcome those challenges, equally important is the role of electrolytic hydrogen in achieving net zero emission targets by 2050. That’s what Klaus Friedel discussed in the next session, ‘Key aspects of a green hydrogen economy – challenges and opportunities’.

With global energy demand set to grow by about 47% over the next 30 years, the need for a sustainable energy transition has never been higher. In his talk, Klaus discussed how hydrogen could be the answer – both in terms of production and usage, and also as energy storage over long periods of time. Discover more about this now.

Rounding off with a roundtable

Finally, we closed off the event with a live roundtable discussion from all our expert speakers! This session covered both batteries and the event’s other focus topic, additive manufacturing. We continued the discussions we’d had throughout the event and heard lots of insightful questions from our audience members – a great way to wrap up our first-ever Future Days event! Catch up on the roundtable here

Similarly to the additive manufacturing talks, these sessions provided an in-depth look at battery and green hydrogen’s role in powering the technologies of tomorrow – and at how materials characterization can accelerate this exciting transition. Thank you to everyone who organized and attended the event – we’re looking forward to welcoming you back for the next Future Days!

To stay up to date on Future Days and all our other specialist content, follow our advanced materials page on LinkedIn.

Explore our range of battery/hydrogen solutions here.