This chemistry prof is rewiring battery tech

Bimlesh Lochab

recently became the first Indian woman scientist to be elected as a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Chemistry

(RSC), the prestigious UK-based professional association that seeks to advance the chemical sciences. She’s currently working in the cutting edge area of making lithium-based batteries more green and reliable.

Lithium-ion batteries

(LIB), which are what power electric vehicles and portable electronic products today, have two major issues. They can catch fire because of short-circuits, overcharging, and electrolyte breakdown. And they use hazardous cobalt oxide.

Lochab’s team, in association with Sagar Mitra, professor in the department of energy science and engineering at IIT Bombay, have developed lithium-sulphur (Li-S) batteries that address both problems. Leveraging the principles of green chemistry, Li-S uses sulphur (an industrial waste) as an alternative to cobalt oxide, together with cashew nutshell liquid and clove oil (non-toxic and environmentally friendly bio-renewable feedstock) as cathodic material (a cathode is the metallic electrode through which current flows).

“Our batteries have high energy capacity. They cannot catch fire thanks to the agro-based cathodic material. And if they do, they tend to self-mitigate the fire. These batteries can be used in electric vehicles, tech gadgets, drones and other electronic devices,” says Lochab, who is professor of chemistry at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR.

Their work was announced in August 2020, and was published in Netherlands-based publishing house Elsevier’s scientific journal Energy Storage Materials.

Lochab’s tryst with batteries began right from her school days in Delhi. “I used to break the cell battery to find out what was the black electrode inside, try to correlate and ask questions,” she recalls. Lochab went on to do a BSc in chemistry in Delhi University, an MSc and MTech in IIT Delhi, and then a DPhil in organic chemistry in Oxford University.

The chemicals she worked with during her research abroad were expensive. Back in India, she began to look for less expensive alternatives. “Elemental sulphur, for example, is a low-cost petroleum industry waste. India is a major producer of cashew nuts, but the nutshell, which is a rich source of cardenol (used in the chemical industry in resins, coatings, etc), is usually thrown away. Since it contains phenolic compounds, even animals don’t eat it,” Lochab says.

Good research, she says, is happening in various labs in India. But transferring these ideas from the lab to pilot scale, and then to the real world requires more collaboration between industry and academia, and adequate funding by the government and others. A lot remains to be done on this front, she says.

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