Since the fall of his freshman year, Giulio Siciliano has conducted research in Dr. White and Dr. Coman’s laboratory, focusing on sodium-ion structural batteries. Siciliano is now the student lead on a NASA-funded project working to develop a multifunctional sodium-ion battery panel demonstrator.
His research involves experimenting with polymer formulations, active materials, coating methods and assembly techniques to build coin cells before scaling successful designs into pouch cells and structural panels. He also helps guide the project’s mechanical testing.
This past summer, Siciliano presented his research at the 249th ECS Conference in Seattle before completing a three-week international research exchange at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
In this Q&A, Siciliano discusses structural battery technology, leading a NASA-funded research project and how his experiences in Seattle and Sweden have influenced his future plans.
What is a sodium-ion structural battery, and how could a multifunctional battery panel benefit future aerospace applications?
A structural battery is essentially a next-generation type of battery.
So you're kind of trying to change the architecture of what a typical lithium-ion battery does. Typical batteries nowadays store electrochemical energy, and that's like their sole purpose. They're used to charge and discharge and power electronic devices or electric vehicles.
So a structural battery kind of revisits this concept and tries to implement multifunctionality to the battery. So instead of just storing electrical energy, it's trying to use materials that also have other properties. So the main material that's currently being utilized is carbon fiber.
Since carbon fiber conducts electricity, it's extremely lightweight and high tensile strength. It can be used for multifunctional purposes. So if you can build a battery that uses carbon fiber, that can store energy, but also potentially be implemented into the structure of a vehicle or of a device or of any system, really.
You could greatly reduce the weight of the system while still storing electrochemical energy. And then the sodium-ion side of that, sodium-ion is just a different chemistry that's used in batteries. So the large majority of batteries nowadays are lithium-ion based, and lithium is a much more scarce critical material.
There's a lot more geopolitical problems with sourcing lithium. Sodium-ion is a lot cheaper. It's far more abundant than lithium, and it's found far more evenly across the globe.
Sodium-ion chemistry is essentially trying to utilize the same working principles of lithium-ion batteries for a greener and more environmentally friendly battery, and then coupling that with the idea of a structural battery.
As the student lead on a NASA-funded project, what have you learned from developing coin cells and scaling them into pouch cells and structural battery panels?
I'd say I've learned a lot getting to kind of lead this project on the student side.
It's been really great. I got to write the application, help kind of formulate all the ideas, help figure out what the plan is, and we just got more. We're trying to apply for a no-cost extension right now for extending the project for another year essentially.
Really what's been great about it is that I've been able to continue what I was doing previously. So previously I was kind of working in the lab building coin cells, and the idea behind a coin cell is to study your materials and be able to isolate them without having other complexities. So when you start scaling up your development, you introduce other problems.
Just scaling anything up makes it more difficult to create and replicate. Working with coin cells in a controlled environment, it's easier to look at these materials individually and figure out what works and what doesn't. And so I'd say I've learned a lot of time management, a lot of leadership, a lot of coordination.
We'll have weekly meetings with all of the undergraduates that work on this project, and I have to help kind of advise and give ideas and mostly problem solve for areas that I don't really have much experience in. So we're also working on mechanical testing. Since it's a structural battery and the whole purpose is multifunctionality, there's not just the electrochemical testing that you kind of do with coin cells and pouch cells and whatnot.
You also have to measure the mechanical properties of this material. So I'm not a mechanical engineer. I don't really know how any of these tests work or how it should be done.
There really isn't a standard because structural batteries are a new material. So there are standards that you can follow, but they're not for structural batteries. So you have to adapt.
You have to create material. You create your polymers or composites in different ways. I'd say, yeah, a lot of adaptability, a good amount of leadership, and I guess just kind of, yeah, trying to keep the progress going.
How did presenting at the ECS Conference and conducting research at Chalmers University in Sweden influence your research interests and future career goals?
They were both fantastic experiences. In Seattle, I got to attend a lot of conferences, or I guess attend the conference, attend a lot of talks and lectures from different experts in the field, graduate students as well as professors.
It kind of just inspired me to keep doing what I'm doing and keep pursuing electrochemistry and batteries specifically. I think I've gone through phases where you kind of start in lab, do a lot of literature review. You're kind of learning how to work in a lab, and then you do a lot of experimental work hands-on.
That gave me a nice break to kind of step away from experimental wet lab work and revisit a lot of papers, reread a lot of papers, hear from a lot of different experts from across the world. So a lot of inspiration was taken from that conference, and it was really just about trying to figure out what I could do here and how I can improve what we're doing here. And then the presentation itself was also super cool.
It was a great experience, especially because I was definitely one of the younger people there and one of the less experienced people there. So it was really cool to be able to present and have people ask me questions and more so like the conversations that sparked from that because, you know, I know the research that I'm doing, but there's a lot of people there that have a lot more expertise than me. So whenever they looked at, you know, the poster in my presentation, they would ask a lot of really cool questions that honestly I hadn't thought about or we hadn't gone to yet.
It just helps you kind of think about what you want to do when you come back to, you know, the lab itself. And then Sweden was also an amazing opportunity. Chalmers also does structural battery work, and they've been doing it for the longest really in terms of any lab.
They're kind of paving or leading the way currently. And so it was really cool to be able to be a part of that lab for a short amount of time. We got assigned a project alongside another graduate student here from USC.
We went together. And, yeah, kind of just I'd say the best part about that was, again, learning from them. They gave lectures.
We got to read papers and discuss with the people that actually wrote those papers. And presenting to them at the end of the three weeks was also amazing. And more so just kind of, yeah, the opportunities to meet people in academia from outside the U.S. was very, very cool.
I got to visit Chalmers. I got to visit KTH in Stockholm and just kind of talk to a lot of researchers from Sweden, which was very cool. And I think it's kind of helped solidify my plans to go to graduate school and also kind of exposed me to academia outside of the U.S. So definitely possibilities there for pursuing graduate school outside of the U.S. as well.
To learn more about Siciliano’s research and connect with him, visit his LinkedIn profile.