2021: Starting of the ERC Synergy Grant “Understanding and making the most of the latest innovations in energy storage”

MoMa-STOR, Grant agreement ID: 951513
PIs: Prof. Markus Antonietti (Director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam) and Prof. Patrice Simon (UT3, Toulouse)

The increasing need for economic, scalable and sustainable energy storage concepts has led to a series of innovative materials and technologies of high performance. An indicative list of these solutions includes making sodium batteries potentially safe and efficient, enhancing the capacity of nanoporous carbon electrodes, using hybrid materials and utilising electrochemical structure changes for better results.

Objectives
The general aim of MoMa-STOR is to address such fundamentally new, non-classical and non-technically covered modes of energy storage and to develop the related materials base for them, to design the next generation of energy storage devices.
These new modes include recent discoveries from Profs Antonietti and Prof Simon, such as a) energy storage by desolvation and matrix change, b) reversible high energy bulk structure transition, and c) metal-metal and metal-semiconductor heterojunction interface effects.
New modes will be carefully analysed with advanced electrochemical techniques, including quartz crystal microbalance, differential electrochemical mass spectroscopy, combined with in situ X-ray and Raman spectroscopy for instance, to gain a precise physico-chemical picture of the operation principles. In operando high resolution electron microscopy and EELS will complete the molecular understanding of the processes.

2021: Horizon Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry, together with Y. Gogotsi

2020: Patrice Simon enters the Académie des Sciences

In 2020, 18 new members will join the Académie des sciences, a venerable institution, founded in 1666 by Colbert, one of the main ministers of King Louis XIV. Among the new entrants is Patrice Simon, deputy director of RS2E, will be part of the “Chemical, biologic and medical sciences, and their applications” division, section of chemistry.
http://www.academie-sciences.fr/pdf/communique/elections_2019.pdf

On the synthesis and potential benefit of Na-rich P-type layered oxides for high power Na-ion batteries
G. Charrad, J. Harmel, R. Berthelot, P.L. Taberna, P. Simon, P. Rozier, Journal of Solid State Chemistry, 326, 2023, 124190.

Understanding Ion Charging Dynamics in Nanoporous Carbons for