Jakub Glowacki

Project: Automated Powder Coating Platform for Long-Life Lithium-ion Batteries

Supervisors: Laurence Hardwick, Gabriella Pizzuto, Matthew Rosseinsky, Alex Neale

What inspired you to pursue this project and join the DAMC CDT?  

After completing my degree, I spent a few years in industry working on novel automated chemistry solutions. Despite coming from an engineering background I really enjoyed working alongside scientists to solve problems that could accelerate discovery in chemistry. In particular, I enjoyed the cutting-edge problem solving nature of the work. As time went on, I found myself wanting to work on purer and more scientific problem solving in this area without the usual constraints of commercial projects, all while wanting to develop my skills as an independent researcher. This lead me toward pursuing a PhD, and due to my experience and enjoyment of developing robotic chemistry systems, and previous experience with automated chemistry at the University of Liverpool, the new CDT and project seemed like a perfect fit and a great environment within which to develop my research skills and do exciting work.

What is your research project about, and what impact do you hope it will have?     

My research project is based around the development of an automated robotic platform for powder-coating electroactive materials used in Lithium-Ion batteries. The powder-coating of these materials is shown to improve their cycle-life leading to batteries that degrade less quickly with use thus reducing the need to replace them as often. With lithium-ion batteries being the leading battery technology used in EVs and mobile devices, reducing their degradation can have massive environmental impact. Currently, research around formulating these coatings is manual, slow and tedious work, leading to a significant bottleneck in research. I hope that by automating this process my project can accelerate discovery in the area leading to ultimately better coatings and longer lasting batteries.

What has been the most exciting or rewarding part of your PhD journey so far and how does your project benefit from being part of an interdisciplinary CDT?        

Working with a multi-disciplinary team and learning from others around you has been very exciting and rewarding - particularly working together to solve a complex problem can be a very rewarding task. You can learn so much by being in this sort of multi-disciplinary environment as you are surrounded by people who have expertise in many different areas and can easily help one another to fill gaps in knowledge. The CDT has been a great environment for this type of interaction.