Clare Grey on the Big Battery Challenge
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2018
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Next time you swear at the battery in your mobile phone, spare a thought for the chemist, Clare Grey. Having developed a new way of looking inside solids (using nuclear magnetic resonance), her interest in batteries was sparked by a man from Duracell who asked her a question at an academic conference, and charged up by some electrochemists she met playing squash. For the last twenty years she has sought to understand the precise chemistry of the rechargeable lithium ion battery. And her insights have led to some significant improvements. In 2015 she built a working prototype of a new kind of battery for electric cars, the lithium air battery. If this laboratory model can be made to run on air not oxygen, it could transform the future, by making electric cars more energy efficient and considerably cheaper.
Clare talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the years she has spent studying rechargeable batteries, seeking to understand, very precisely, the chemical reactions that take place inside them; and how this kind of fundamental understanding can help us to make batteries that are fit for the 21st century.
Producer: Anna Buckley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
| 0:15.0 | It's in the hands of the creator. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong |
| 0:25.3 | thing. |
| 0:26.3 | Julie, at your service. |
| 0:27.3 | Listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. |
| 0:30.3 | Hello, I'm Jim Alkalee and you're about to listen to the quite excellent podcast of the life |
| 0:37.0 | scientific in which I get top scientists to tell me how they got to where they are today. |
| 0:43.5 | Next time you swear at the battery in your mobile phone |
| 0:46.4 | because it's just died at a highly inconvenient moment, |
| 0:49.5 | may I politely suggest that you pause for a moment |
| 0:52.2 | and think about how lucky we are |
| 0:53.9 | that rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are as good as they are. My guest today is |
| 0:58.6 | the chemist Professor Claire Gray. For the last 20 years she studied what happens inside these rechargeable batteries. |
| 1:05.0 | She wants to understand and improve their chemistry and several of her insights have led to advances in battery technology that we all benefit from today. |
| 1:14.0 | She's also looking to the future, working out how to make the batteries that will be needed to power |
| 1:18.7 | the 21st century, creating better batteries for electric cars and even bigger batteries that can store the energy generated by renewable sources for use when the sun isn't shining or there's no wind. |
| 1:30.0 | She is a founder member of the new multi-million pound Faraday institution that began late last year, |
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