Jeffrey W. Long is a research chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, US
What does your role entail?
I do experimental work as part of a group. Our group primarily focuses on materials discovery for power/energy applications, particularly electrochemical systems – batteries, electrochemical capacitors (ECs, also known as supercapacitors) and to a lesser extent, fuel cells.
What are latest developments in your field?
The electrochemical capacitor field is becoming much more popular. These are devices that charge and discharge much more quickly than batteries, typically on the order of a few seconds. They don’t have quite as much energy, but you don’t always need high energy density for particular applications. Sometimes, you need that rapid switching between charge and discharge states. Over the past 10 years, this has become a much more popular technology and we’ve been contributing to that by developing new materials that enable that kind of process.
Visit Chemistry World to read the full interview.
