Dr. Yelizaveta Morkhova, a junior researcher at the Laboratory of Crystal Chemistry and Crystal Design of the SCTMS, won the competition "Initiative Research by Young Scientists" aimed at supporting young researchers under the age of 33 who defended their Ph.D. dissertations.The grant amount is up to 2 million rubles annually, the duration is 2 years. The topic of Yelizaveta’s project is "High-performance theoretical search and synthesis of new promising sodium-conducting materials for solid-state metal-ion batteries". RSF project number is: 23-73-01067.
The research is directly related to the creation of sodium-ion batteries as a possible alternative to lithium-ion batteries. The low cost of materials, safety and applicability for large-scale energy storage systems are the advantages of sodium-ion batteries. However, there is a number of technological problems, for example, the difficulty of selecting suitable conductive materials. Within the framework of the project, it is planned to conduct a theoretical study of Na+-ionic conductivity in all crystalline inorganic oxide, chalcogenide, halide structures, as well as in polyanionic compounds presented in the ICSD database (about 9000 compounds). The theoretical part of the study will include calculations of migration energies in structures, ionic conductivity, and for the most promising materials, quantum-chemical diffusion modeling will be carried out to estimate the migration energy of working ions. It is also planned to synthesize at least three promising compounds with subsequent measurement of conductivity.
The results of the study will be entered into the BatteryMaterials database. And additionally, an online service will be implemented that allows calculating the geometric characteristics of conduction channels in various inorganic compounds.