CJ Sturgill’s research explores battery materials that could support faster charging and longer-lasting performance. He also works to improve how researchers compare findings across battery studies, helping create a clearer picture of how different materials perform.
What drew you to studying materials that could help batteries charge faster?
I like this because I think this is an important start to everything—motive, right? What’s motivating you and pushing you and kind of giving you that passion?
For me, it’s interesting. I really saw it more along the lines of this affects everybody, right? Whether you’re somebody that has a lot of technology, or it spans all the way to even the grid system—what powers our hospitals and our houses—even to the transportation sector. I think fast charging is a problem where everybody can benefit.
If you look at a gas-powered car, it’s going to take about five minutes or less to fill your tank up. We can’t get to that right now. I think if we pushed an electric vehicle to make that more convenient for the average consumer—so it can charge faster—it makes it more appealing.
But that’s just one. We can see that being amazing on your smartphone. Just set it down for a minute or two, and it’s fully charged and can last. I think in our paper, it was 10,000 cycles. That was awesome, right? That’s the equivalent of charging every day for 27 years. It’s just a cool aspect to consider. Now, obviously, things make that harder to scale up, but it’s a cool thought.
This was not what I expected when I joined. The idea was very naive at the beginning: What can I do to help bring these long-lasting, fast-charging battery materials to life? We’ve gone a little bit from there.
I love tech. You’ll have earbuds, a laptop, a watch and a phone. All these things require a battery. I saw this report, I think it was in 2024 when I was first starting my Ph.D., about how the average number of battery-powered devices per person had doubled since 2022. They were looking at how it had doubled in a span of a couple of years.
You think about how they’re becoming more readily available. It’s not that fast charging is needed for every scenario, but it gives us options when it comes to future technology and how we think about using it. It’ll change how an iPhone is used. Charging it overnight might not be needed anymore. That’s a whole habit, right? It can literally change our habits and the way we act around technology, which is a cool aspect to consider.
Your recent research found that a material with more structural defects could charge faster and remain durable. What surprised you most about that result?
Starting my Ph.D., when my professor was telling me what the project plan was, it was like, “Hey, we’re going to induce defects in these materials and then study their structure-property relationships.”
To me, I was like, “Well, why are we making it defective?” I thought of the word “defective.” Why are we making something defective and hoping it’s going to get better? That seems very counterintuitive.
I think this is an interesting point in research as a whole—thinking outside of the box. We’re obviously not the first to go down this path of defect engineering, but it’s a cool aspect to consider defects in the sense that these materials can enable different, what we call, percolation networks and actually improve certain properties, especially ionic transport.
It was a very counterintuitive trend to notice up front. I always thought of a defect as being bad, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes certain amounts of defects can work to improve something.
It doesn’t always have to be perfect to be the best. It’s what you might call a Goldilocks zone. There’s a perfect amount of defects that makes it just right. It’s an interesting concept to consider.
You also develop ways to compare results across battery studies. Why is that important, and what do you hope other researchers can learn from your work?
You kind of heard me mention it up front with the example of graphite being a common anode material and what we’re working with, which are these very dense metal oxides. It’s important to be able to compare them on a one-to-one level to know which one performs better.
I think everyone needs to know a good way to place their battery, their material or whatever they’re studying in the literature and in the grand scheme of things.
Early in our project, we saw that there are a lot of people publishing values, but they’re using certain techniques or certain ways of claiming properties about the material that are correct, but they don’t work together as a whole. It makes them difficult to use for a universal comparison.
Let’s say we have this database where we’re comparing the statistics of every battery material. There are certain things missing to put that into perspective as a whole. We’ve really worked on what’s needed to compare these materials on a one-to-one level.
That means ensuring that you’re actually studying a property from the material, comparing something that takes the entire state of charge into consideration and making sure that you have the right rate-limiting steps when you’re testing the material.
There are a lot of things that go into this, but I think the overarching goal is the big point here. If I’m going to compare anything, you need to compare apples to apples and not apples to oranges.
Sometimes, looking at data in the field, it is correct in the sense of what it’s doing, but there are a lot of individual studies and not studies that can work together as a comprehensive study in the literature. I can’t just pull tons of studies and say, “Here’s my total ranking.”
There are a lot of details between them that make it so one study isn’t really comparable to another. You’re left with the sense that you can’t really compare them unless you want the data to be affected by technique-driven issues instead of real differences in material properties. This is a bigger problem that is out there, and there is a lot more needed to fix these aspects.