Hello, and welcome to the Physics World weekly podcast. Home to nearly 10,000,000 people, the Chicago Metropolitan Area or Chicagoland is one of the largest urban areas in The US. A scientific powerhouse, the region is home to two US national labs, Argonne and Fermilab, as well as top notch academic institutions, including the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Physics World's Margaret Harris was in Chicagoland recently and met two scientists.
One who leads a national collaborative center focused on the future of battery recycling, And the other who leads an institution dedicated to molecular engineering. Those conversations are coming up after this message about an event that's sponsored by the Institute of Physics, which also brings you Physics World. On the May, The Economist is hosting commercializing Quantum Global twenty twenty five in London.
Participants will join global leaders from business, science, and policy for two days of real world insights into quantum's future. In London, you'll explore breakthroughs in quantum computing, communications, and sensing, and discover how these technologies are shaping industries, economies, and global regulation. You can register for the event at events.economist.com. First up, Margaret speaks with the physicist Nadia Mason.
She's dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, which focuses on quantum engineering, materials for sustainability, and immuno engineering. Here's that conversation. So first question is, you know, molecular engineering is kind of a a new concept. How would you define this term, and how does that sort of explain all the things that we're going on here?
So molecular engineering is, it's new. It's it's an exciting way, I think, of putting together different fields that have the same goals. So the idea is that you're you're building things from the from the molecular level up. And it's something that you couldn't do years ago because you didn't have the ability to manipulate individual molecules in the same way or even
image individual molecules. You know, the revolution in nanotechnology in the seventies and eighties and nineties is really what led today to our ability to even think about how do we engineer and manipulate, combine things at this really basic molecular level to to move toward applications that that utilize them. You know, I'm I come from physics, so I think about atoms. You know? And we still don't have the ability, really, I mean, to to put together atoms in a
way that leads to functional devices. We can do it with scanning tunneling microscopy, but we really can't do it at the single atomic level. Right? And before, we couldn't even do that at the molecular level, but now we can with different capabilities in in in chemical engineering, in materials engineering, in physics. By combining all of those things, we can now think about, okay, how do we take a molecule and functionalize it in just the right way to lead to the next,
you know, therapeutic that helps cure cancer? How do we take a nano sized bit of of material, which you can think of on the molecular scale, and engineer defects to make the next generation of quantum sensor? How do we take materials that form the backbone of our most common plastics and modify them on really the atom by atom level to make them more recyclable? These are things I I think we just couldn't do, but now we know how. So that those those form the basis of molecular
engineering. It's it's it's a way of of thinking about engineering the future from a small scale to the largest. And so I think you you've got, I hear the Pritzker School of Nucklesh Yes. Got three different sort of fields, I think. So we're talking mostly about energy and quantum today Yeah. Yeah. The ones that are closest to physics. But I guess there's also immunoengineering. That's right. What do you see as the connections between
these areas? How does that what's that kind of cross pollination that you see between them? Yeah. Great question. Well, I mean, at at UChicago, we thought we wanted we didn't wanna create a traditional school of engineering that had departments that were just defined by whatever terms were important in the early nineteen hundreds, like, you know, mechanics. I mean, it's still important, but it's not that doesn't that doesn't define
a problem. It defines an an area of, you know, a very broad area of training. So the idea is today, how do you think about the problems we wanna solve and train for those? And so that's how we chose these three areas. There were things that were both relevant right now that were that we could build on existing strengths at Chicago UChicago and in the community, but also that we thought were going to be really important for the future. So quantum engineering is is
now. It's happening. This is something that when I started in grad school, it was just quantum mechanics, and now we're we have companies and we're designing devices. And, you know, engineering, same thing. This is related to really the fundamentals of how you manipulate molecules for for biology and for therapeutics and applications in the biological sphere.
And especially immunology is something that even in the past ten years, it's become more fear that the immune system affects almost every disease that we that we have. I think something like eighty percent of deaths are actually immune system disorders that, you know, that something breaks down and then then affects the immune system, which is what causes your organs to fail and you to die. And then same thing with molecular
engineering, for energy and sustainability. That is, of course, one of the biggest problems we have out there. Now the great thing is because we're thinking all about molecules manipulating, having things interact across the board, across what are really disparate fields, what you'd think are disparate fields, our faculty and researchers can use similar techniques to work you know, to inform each other. They can they can think about applications that they might not have thought of otherwise.
You know, so one example is I was just in the lab of one of of two of our faculty who are in the quantum group, but also in the immuno group, because one of them, Peter Maurer, is using quantum sensors. So, vacancy sensors and, you know, vacancies in in materials, and now even proteins in biological systems as quantum states to image biological systems. And so the student who I was talking to in his lab yesterday is a is a biophysicist who is actually, like, making,
you know, fluorophores. And, there is some green thing that was like an algae somewhere. I don't know. I don't even know what they were doing with it, but it was funny seeing it in a lab that had dilution refrigerators and lasers and things like that because they're they're not just, like, trapping and moving
things around. They're actually using proteins as quantum sensors to, you know, to image what's happening in individual cells to see what, you know, ion channels and things are doing for for that can affect specific biological functions. And so, you know, another one of our faculty, Sihang Huang, is looking at
bioadhesives. So he's confining material science and looking at how to make adhesives, but functionalizing them to work on organs with immunoreceptors and things that make them both compatible, but also can, you know, suppress very specific reactions when you use these adhesives in situ in your body. And he's one of the first people to ever do this. And, you know, again, they're working he's he was working directly with other faculty who just
have who know the immunotherapies. And in the Quantum Lab, they're working directly with, people who work on therapeutics. So I think there's you know, we always talk about how exciting science happens at the interface, but here, you know, we're all in the same building. And I've personally never seen so many actual collaborations between people in what seems like really disparate fields, but are just breaking boundaries
all the way. So super exciting, I think, for us, but also for our collective future. How does your own research fit into that? You know, you've been talking about other people's research. Yeah. How do you see your your own research? Yeah. Tell us about that. Yeah. So I'm a I'm I'm trained as a quantum physicist. All of my all of my degrees are in physics, and I focus on correlated electronic
systems. So systems where the electrons interact strongly or nanoscale systems where you get new behaviors because things are are so small. I'm really more on the on the quantum material side, which is looking at at how do you you know, what what new functionalities can you get out of materials when you think about them in the in the quantum regime.
These are, you know, this is directly relevant to a lot of our quantum engineering that's going on where we're thinking about, you know, what are what are the next generation of quantum sensors? What are the what are the next you know, how do we connect classical computers to quantum computers? How do we make quantum computer computers more more viable by increasing their coherence on the long on long time scales?
You know, I think I I do the my group does the does the legwork to think of the next generation of of materials and applications and phenomena that can feed into all of this sort of quantum engineering. Now you ask how it bridges. It bridges because I think of materials as backbone of everything. Right? If you you if you have if you have a new material, then you can find all sorts of uses and applications for it. So you can think of these new, we work on graphene, which
is a purely two dimensional material. That's something that people in quantum care about because it's an electronic material, but also in, you know, our immuno engineers are using this as as scaffolding, as a flexible scaffolding for different types of of, of functionalized membranes, for example. So, you know, the material backbone is another thing that crosses all of all of these things. And you talk about, you know, some trends
and developments in the field to know. What is what is coming up that you're most excited about five years in the future, three years in the future? Yeah. I I touched on this a little already, but I really think it is the intersection
of these different fields. I think that that the intersection of biology and quantum is something that that our our faculty have been exploring extremely successfully that I think is is viable, that we will have a quantum sensor that can look inside a cell and will have direct applications for for therapeutics, in a way that we just couldn't see thing at a in a scale we couldn't see things before. I think that's, you know, that's five years down the line. I think that'll be revolutionary.
As I mentioned, materials people who are also combining materials and medicine in a in in a way that comes from that from working with deeply people who are deeply knowledgeable about the medicine and working directly with them to make things that not only, like, you know, kind of work inside a body, but make it better. Right? They can now heal things but work.
You know, in the in the area of of climate and energy, which is incredibly important for the future, you know, we we will have new battery technologies, for example. There's new, non lithium batteries coming online, sodium batteries, for example, that'll be cheaper, that'll be faster, that'll be more efficient. We're working directly on those.
I think I I'm excited to see how we will continue to address our needs for we we have a new institute for for climate and and sustainable growth, and so I've been thinking a lot about sustainable growth. And, you know, so we we do have a need for growth in our society, but, of course, globally as well. Right? We we all deserve higher living standards globally, not just in this country, why we deserve to have healthy,
happy lives. That doesn't mean more money or technology, but to get there, we will need to equalize the amount of resources and technology that are available. We need to do that in a sustainable way. And to get there, we need to invent those technologies to make them cheap enough, to make them effective enough, to make them available enough to help lift everyone in in the world,
not just The US, but everywhere. And so it's a long winded way of saying, I'm excited because I think we can get there. I think that the next five to ten years, because we have to, there'll be an explosion in in developing those sort of technologies across across the board. I really you know?
And okay. I'm I'm biased toward the three areas that we focus on, but I think that these are areas that are are going to continue to explode in in the buy in the biomedical space, in the energy space, in the quantum space, and in the climate space also. Yeah. You talked about, you know, getting there in the next five to ten years. What are the big challenges? What are the barriers you have to overcome to to produce a quantum sense of the Yeah. Incense in Yeah. In the human body to
develop sustainable materials. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, this brings us all the way back to molecular engineering in the materials space. Sometimes we just need to jump in materials. We need to be need to understand materials better to improve their properties. So in quantum, one of the biggest limitations is that we we can't maintain our quantum wave functions. It's the coherence
times. Those are often materials problems. We have to know what's what is preventing what is making the these quantum states unstable, and and how do we engineer that away. And we're making strides toward that, but I think we have to do a better job of that. And or how do we engineer around it to mitigate those effects, like error correction in quantum computing? We're making strides toward that too. But some of that is incremental strides that are necessary, and some of it
is actually jumps in knowledge. You know? It it you can it's when I think about fundamental jumps, they can be in fundamental science, but you also need fundamental engineering jumps. They think back to the transistor and why we have microelectronics today. It was the invention of the transistor
that was one big jump. But then the invention of the integrated circuit, which is really an engineering feat, was the next big jump that allowed us to go from something that was as big as our hand to something that, you know, as, you know, supercomputer in our pocket, basically. Right? Our our phones. Right? All these things. So so we need some of those, you know a lot of the fundamental jumps have been made, but we need some of those engineering jumps to be made.
And I think across the board in in battery space too. You know, we know we know where we want to go, but what are the materials that allow us to do that? How do we actually connect them? How do we think in new ways? How do we just kinda free our brains and have those moments that, okay, we can we can do this or even just play around and discover suddenly that this works in a way that was unexpected? We we need more of those moments to
build the future. And I think that as long as we keep supporting basic engineering and science, we'll get there. But we do need to keep pushing in those directions. So you talk about the the need to improve materials, the need to improve the the basic functionality. But after that, of course, there's a challenge of taking those things into commercialization and eventually to market. How what are some of the ideas that you have to overcome that
that gap? Yeah. I think there's there's there's a broad understanding everywhere from the NSF up to the highest, you know, levels of government and in the labs that we can't it's not good enough to just invent something in the lab, especially in the school of engineering. You really wanna get what you your idea to have effect, have impact. And to do that, you have to get in the hands of people who will use it. And to do that, you have to work with
companies. You have to either start your own company that's gonna utilize these these devices and these things that you make or work with existing companies.
We really believe in that. We've been, supporting faculty starting companies, working working with companies, and working with industry at every level, including having starting, you know, networks that have industry come into our labs and tell us what their greatest needs are and us tell them what we're working on and what's cutting edge and so we can work together to bring things quickly
to market. It's also important to just to understand that we face such big challenges that no one lab, no one school, no one university can do this alone. And one of the things that has really attracted me the most to being in Chicago and at the University of Chicago is that we've been able to participate in and really help create ecosystems that build industries and that build these connections between basic research and impact as efficiently as possible. So we work
with the national labs very, very closely. We work with with companies. We work with the government. We work with the other universities across the state and across Midwest and and across the world even to make sure that we create ecosystems that support research, products, impact, and improve lives as efficiently as possible. And we've done that in the quantum sphere here in Chicago. I think we've we've really helped make Chicago the the center of the
quantum world. This happened because of a big support from the government, the governor from especially the state government, governor Pritzker, has been incredibly
supportive of quantum. We've worked really closely with our our state universities, University of Illinois, with Northwestern University, and with the labs, and been able to build something where quantum companies now want to come here to work with researchers, to build things, to test, to make sure that we can just get this technology furthered as as quickly as possible. And we wanna do that in the energy sphere. We wanna do that in the biosphere. We wanna make sure that that we're
having impact as efficiently as possible. And we're getting really good at that. So I'm I'm incredibly excited to see what happens in the next five years. So I think there'll there'll be a lot a lot of positive change. Elijah Mason, thank you very much. My pleasure. That was Nadia Mason of the University of Chicago in conversation with Physics World's Margaret Harris. Now, Margaret speaks with Jeffrey Spangenberger, who leads the Materials Recycling Group at Argonne National Laboratory.
They talk about the Resell Center, a national collaboration of industry, academia, and national laboratories that Spangenberger leads. He explains how ReCell is advancing recycling for current and future battery technologies. The first thing I wanted to ask, you know, just as when you're talking about battery recycling, what types of batteries are we talking about? Are we talking about the batteries in your phone, batteries in your car, both, everything?
Yeah. Specifically, right now, we're focused on lithium ion batteries. Not lithium metal batteries, lithium ion batteries. But they can be in your car, in your EV, your hybrid, or they could be in your phone, your cell phone. They could also be in storage applications, so the grid or your your house backup, things like that. So how do you recycle a battery? Like, what goes into that process? So the actual process of of a battery is done
more prominently in two different fashions. There's hydrometallurgical recycling, and there's pyrometallurgical recycling. In pyrometallurgical recycling, we use heat to essentially burn off with the organics, and then the metals are recovered in, in the furnace. And there's two fractions. There's, a metal alloy, which has a lot of the great metals, and then the copper, the precious metals, which are not really in too much on a battery except maybe on a on a
electric panel or something like that. But there is also a slag, and then that slag contains lithium metal, unfortunately, as well as aluminum. Those two are in in batteries. They can be recovered, but it's a little bit more difficult than they would be normally. So that's one of the the issues with pyro. That's not to say that pyro isn't good. There are a lot of good applications for pyro. And and there's not one hydro or pyro is not gonna take over the world in
recycling. There are a lot of different pros and cons of each. In hydro metallurgic or recycling, you usually shred the battery to liberate the metals. Metals are typically what you're going after as a number one material. You put it in acid. You dissolve the the metals, and then you can separate those metals out and and recover them and put them into new new products that way.
So those are the two main ones. We also work, along with some other companies on direct recycling, which is a third type of recycling. There's also the other materials other than metals that you wanna get from recycling, plastics. There's, fluorinated products, which we need to make sure we keep our eye on. That would be in the polymers that are in the some of the polymers that are in a a lithium ion battery.
The electrolyte salt has fluorine in it. So these are all materials that, you know, should be dealt with. What else is in a battery? The anode. So the anode is typically graphite. It it is a larger portion of the battery mass wise, and so we wanna we wanna reuse those materials as much as possible. In fact, natural graphite is a critical material
that not many people think about. But and and there's both synthetic and graphite and and natural graphite in these batteries, so it's important that we recycle those as well and not just go after the money making metals. So how do you get to me it's kind of easy conceptually to imagine, okay, in some some way that with metal, you melt it down and then you work out what you know, there's various quite established processes for
us to separate it out. How do you recycle something like graphite, or how do you recycle some of the fluorinated compounds that you need to recycle, presumably because they they would otherwise get into the environment to do bad things there. Right. Yeah. So with graphite, there's people working on it. The way that you process a battery can have I don't still wanna say good things happen to it, but maybe not bad things or
bad things happen to it. Like, if you put graphite in in acid, a lot of times that makes it more difficult to reuse in new batteries. The the best way is to take the material and reuse it in a new battery. Fix it, basically, rinse it off, refurbish it, if you will. It's not that easy, though. There are processes that make that part easier, but you can also use graphite for a lot of different material sources. So and that's
good. And recycling, you know, it's really important, I think, to to try and close that loop. If it's in a car, put it back in a car. But sometimes, if you don't put it back into the original application, you still are relieving it from sourcing somewhere else for another product. Right? So maybe it doesn't go into a battery. Maybe it goes into a reductant or something in our furnace.
With the the fluorines, I think that's a real challenge with with how we deal with that is they're in low quantities in a battery. And pyro, actually, what happens is they're well, they go up into the, exhaust, and they're captured and treated. So, so you collect them. In hydro, there's a lot of work that's going on now, especially with PFAS being a a big consideration. There's work to remove it. There's work to capture it when we're recycling it as well.
Why is it so important that we get better at recycling batteries? Yeah. Great question. The the funny thing is on the other side of the lab, he's probably gonna be talking about all the great work that's going into making the batteries the new batteries better. And when you make a new battery better, it usually means cutting cost and improving performance. When you cut costs specifically, it makes recycling more difficult because we need money on the back end to fund those processes.
So if you take all the valuable metals out there, you take out the cost of the materials, it makes recycling harder. So that's why we need to be better at recycling. And so it's important that we don't just work at this, find a solution, and call it good. We gotta continue to to improve because it's gonna be more difficult as we go down the road. Plus new chemistries, we always need to to work on what's what's coming down the road that we're gonna be seeing in our recycling plants.
What about the sort of supply chain aspect? I mean, some of them some of these, materials, particularly the metals, high value metals, it's not just that it's expensive to develop and it's there's a finite amount of them out there, and they may not necessarily be in locations that are easy to get at. That's right. So, you know, The US is very low in quantities of these materials that go into the batteries. We get them from other countries, and it puts us at a security risk.
So recycling is important from that perspective because we want to get these materials, buy them once from another country, get them here and keep them here and recycle them and keep them within our domestic boundaries. Another reason to recycle is because in some predictions, if we don't change our chemistries, we're gonna actually run out of the materials, not have enough to meet our projections.
Cobalt, specifically, is really difficult. So we have to recycle those materials to make sure that we have them available instead of just mining them, using them, and throwing them off. What are the main challenges facing a center like this in trying to develop better ways of recycled batteries? I see. I think there's two answers that I wanna I wanna give to that. One is our objective is to help industry. We want industry to succeed.
And so there's a lot of good challenges out there that are, that we're excited to tackle. And so we do work with industry. We work together collaboratively with them to address these challenges. The other aspect of that is and this gets back into the direct recycling. We'll do some more far out research. We'll look at some of the more challenging stuff that industry maybe doesn't wanna spend the money on. And so we'll look at things like, originally, direct recycling was a very
not well known. It was a not unknown, but not well known method of recycling batteries. That's you you have a battery and you make another battery with it. A little bit to be more specific on that, I guess, I would say direct recycling is to take it could be any material, but we focus on the cathode of the battery.
So we take the cathode, and instead of putting in an acid and dissolving the metal into metal ions or putting it in a furnace and melting it down into a a reduced metal alloy, we keep it as a cathode. We fix it while it's still a cathode. It's never changing its cathode structure, and we're making new cathode out of it so it can go into a new battery. And the reason that's so important is because to make cathode, which is the most expensive part of a battery,
it has two portions. There's the materials that go into it, and then there's the processing, the manufacturing cost of it. When you dissolve in an acid or melt it in a in a furnace, you have to take those materials and remanufacture that into a cathode, and that can be a substantial amount of the money to make cathode. So if you don't do that, the value is basically, in in some cases, half of the cost of a battery may be from raw materials. Sometimes 10% is just is the raw materials, and 90%
is the processing cost. And so huge opportunity for cost gains, improve economy and environmental, impacts. The the website mentions that Resell is working to advance recycling technologies for current and future battery chemistries. Mhmm. What is Resell? Good question.
So resell is is a federally funded program that is a a collaboration of four national laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory. We also have some universities that are doing work with us. But they have these four focus areas, direct recycling, advanced resource recovery, design for sustainability, and modeling and analysis.
And all of these focus areas are used in order to reach the ultimate goal of lowering the cost of new batteries. The whole thing has to come down to or comes down to decarbonizing our planet. And, to do that, batteries do a great job at it. And we wanna get more people driving EVs and using them in the grid and and all these applications. To do that, we need to lower the cost, And recycling is a huge opportunity to do that. I'm really interested about this and future chemistries.
What are those chemistries, and how much is recyclability taken into account when people are developing new battery types? Yeah. Great question. You you do ask all the good questions. So we spend some time looking at new chemistries. We don't spend too much time because as you probably know, some people may not. But, like, you'll see in the news, some group found the solution to the batteries, and it's gonna last a million years and
all that stuff. But you see it all over the place, and that may be at milligram quantity, scales or, you know, maybe not feasible at in large quantity. So we take advantage of in a vehicle, a vehicle last fifteen years. So if it's not in production, we we know we don't need to worry about it too much. But we wanna make sure that we're looking at chemistries that are starting to take shape that are gonna end up on a vehicle or in some application.
And we wanna make sure that it's not going to cause a big problem because you can contaminate a big stream if you have a little bit of something in it. So if they're using a little bit of something in it, we wanna recommend that they don't go with that chemistry. So we have four focus areas in resell. There is direct recycling. There is, advanced resource recovery. That's our second one. Advanced resource recovery is the, recovery of materials that we can't directly recycle.
Then there is modeling and analysis and design for sustainability. And design for sustainability is what I wanna mention. We want to make our batteries, use materials, use assembly methods in a way we wanna make them better. We wanna design better ways, better materials to put into our batteries so that the recycling can be handled more easily, more cost effectively.
And that's probably the most challenging focus area that we have is trying to change what's working today so that it's easier to recycle tomorrow. It's it's just when things aren't broken, don't fix them kinda just challenging. But those are the things that we're doing, we're very aware of. And you think about anything when you look around a room, what's designed for recycling? What's designed for sustainability? There are some, like, our water bottles got
thinner plastics. Right? So that's good. And I think that's always a consideration. But what, you know, what big changes can we make that are really gonna catapult us into the next generation of design? I think that's really cool. Final question then. You know? What's what's the dream here? Where's where's the field headache? Give me your your sort of vision for a future of battery cycle. How how would it work in your sort of ideal system? Oh, how much time do you have?
No. I think the real quick answer or the quickest answer is it's circular. We get to that circular economy that that people like to say. So we buy these materials once. And in the beginning, you know, I'm not naive to think that these batteries are gonna power our vehicles or store the energy that powers our vehicles forever. Right? There's this s curve. So we're just we're at the bottom of the s curve. But as we get more materials available for recycling, we can put them into the
recycling that we have. And, eventually, there's that inflection point where we can put most of that material into recycling into new products, and we can actually require very little material to make our batteries. At some point, though, something's gonna replace lithium ion batteries just like we're replacing the internal combustion engine now.
And so during the lifespan or the majority of the lifespan of these lithium ion batteries, I think, you know, towards the end, we wanna be able to have this complete circularity or near complete circularity so that we don't have this this security risk of relying on other other countries. We have cost. You know, if you have a a pile of dirt and a pile of batteries, you know, which one would you think would be cheaper to get the raw materials to
make a battery from? Right? It's probably from batteries. Now we just happen to be processing dirt for so long. We're good at it, and we're at scale, and we're not. Recycling batteries is very new. But, eventually, they're gonna equalize, and, and they're gonna be a great resource for those materials. So yeah. Thank you very much. That was Jeffrey Spangenberger of Argonne National Laboratory in conversation with Physics World's Margaret Harris.
Before that, Margaret spoke with Nadia Mason of the University of Chicago. Thanks to all three of them for coming on the podcast. And a special thanks to our producer, Fred Isles. On the May, The Economist is hosting commercializing quantum global twenty twenty five in London. Participants will join global leaders from business, science, and policy for two days of real world insights into quantum's future. In London, you'll explore breakthroughs in quantum computing, communications, and sensing.
And you'll discover how these technologies are shaping industries, economies, and global regulation. You can register for the event at events.economist.com. I'm afraid that's all the time we have for this week's podcast. We'll be back again next week. See you then.