PLU professor charges up his students while building a better battery
We all want batteries that last longer, charge quicker and rest comfortably in our cellphones, cars and hearing aids without suddenly exploding.
A Pacific Lutheran University professor who develops designer molecules for batteries has just been awarded a prestigious scientific research award for getting closer to those goals while fostering the next generation of scientists.
Dean Waldow was given the Lynwood W. Swanson Scientific Research Award by the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust Nov. 8. It comes with $15,000.
The award is given to a senior faculty member at a Pacific Northwest four-year school who heads a nationally recognized research program while mentoring future scientists.
The work Waldow and his students do will help reduce humanity’s need for energy and help mitigate climate change, he said.
“If you could double the storage (of energy) in your phone, that would be a good thing,” Waldow told The News Tribune.
Building a better battery
There are about a dozen different types of batteries in use commercially.
Lead-acid turns over your car, lithium-ion allows you to check Facebook on your smart phone and alkaline lights up that flashlight you keep by the backdoor. They all use different combinations of chemicals to hold and discharge electricity.
Waldow’s work focuses on lithium-ion batteries — the kind commonly found in cell phones.
On a recent evening, a pair of Waldow’s students was in a PLU lab melting polymers — large molecules. Polymers are the workhorse in their research. They store energy in batteries.
“It’s like a chain with many links,” Waldow said of polymers. “We’re designing specific attributes of each of those links to try to improve the battery’s ability to provide power, to operate normally in a safer mode without risks for these events.”
The events Waldow spoke of are why lithium-ion batteries are now banned in checked luggage on U.S. aircraft.
In 2013, days after Boeing delivered a new 787 Dreamliner to Japan Airlines, the plane’s lithium-ion batteries caught fire in Boston. A catastrophic disaster was avoided because the plane had just landed. Boeing retrofitted the batteries on all its 787s following the grounding of its entire fleet.
In 2017, Samsung Galaxy phones caught fire in several isolated incidents. The company blamed the batteries.
Lately, the all-electric Tesla car is the subject of media coverage whenever one of its lithium-ion batteries catches on fire, usually following a crash.
In all those cases, the common ingredient was the liquid cores of the batteries. Those liquids can become flammable in the right conditions.
One of Waldow’s goals is to produce solid state batteries — batteries without liquids. Solid batteries have a reduced fire risk compared with liquid batteries.
“They may still catch on fire, but they would not burn like a liquid,” he said. “It would take a lot to get them to burn.”
Being a mentor
Waldow has mentored more than 70 students during his 27 years at PLU. Part of the Swanson Award criteria was based on his commitment to students.
Hannah Hamovitz is a senior PLU chemistry student.
“My favorite thing about him is that he has confidence in us as students,” Hamovitz said. “He gives us more responsibilities.”
Those responsibilities allow the students to succeed — or fail.
“We learn how to (deal with) things not going perfectly, and he gives us the opportunity to feel proud when things do work out,” she said. “He’s really a mentor.”
Hamovitz, 26, isn’t sure yet if she’ll stay in battery research post-college.
“This was eye-opening research,” she said. “I didn’t even really realize how important research is until I came here.”
Waldow’s students operate at a level far above freshman chemistry.
“From a research perspective, we’re working at the forefront of science,” he said. “What we’re doing in the lab, people have never done before.”
Like Thomas Edison testing thousands of different substances before hitting on his light bulb filament, Waldow and his students create and test one substance after another. There are steps forward and backward.
“The materials we’ve made are better in some sense, but then they have challenges in other directions,” he said.
The school’s research has been aided by top quality tools.
Inside a glassed-in room in the school’s Rieke Science Center sits a nuclear magnetic spectrometer.
The center of the spectrometer is 4 degrees above absolute zero — almost as cold as outer space. The machine allows Waldow to test resistance of the molecules he makes, which in turn tells him how well it conducts electricity.
The $750,000 machine was purchased through grants. Grant writing is one of Waldow’s skills. The spectrometer is part of the $2 million in scientific equipment he’s obtained during his career.
The future of batteries
Half a century ago, most Americans only interacted with batteries when they started their cars or popped a couple of “D cells” into a flashlight.
Today, batteries power phones, drones, electric cars, computers, cordless tools, cameras and thousands of other devices. The field is ripe for innovation and improvement.
“Where we’ve gone with batteries is increasing the amount of energy we can pack into a battery,” Waldow said. “We’ve gone from powering your transistor radio to powering your (cordless) drill.”
That ever-increasing need for more power in a smaller battery is what fuels the industry, he said.
Another factor is quickly getting that energy out of the battery. The top Tesla electric car model goes from zero to 60 in a rocket-like 2.4 seconds.
“Some batteries work really well at holding a lot of energy but can’t deliver it very quickly,” he said.
Using rechargeable batteries rather than disposable varieties is yet another goal for researchers, Waldow said.
Batteries, he said, will be a key component in reducing the dependence on fossil fuels.
“Without the ability to store and use energy when you need it, we’re going to be dependent on when we can generate it,” he said.
