Professor Sobrido was invited to give the talk on 'Manufacturing Electrodes with Tailored Structures for Efficient Mass Transport in Flow Batteries: Challenges and Opportunities'.

Deep and rapid decarbonisation of the global energy systems require the wholesale replacement of fossil fuels with renewable resources. However, these resources are intermittent and unpredictable challenging the existing grid infrastructure which is based on the just-in-time dispatchable generation enabled by combustion of fossil fuels.

Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are excellent candidates for large-scale, long duration energy storage due to their flexible design, long service life, high reliability, and environmental friendliness.

The group's research seeks to improve upon one of their performance-determining components: the electrodes. We use electrospinning to synthesise sustainable new materials, replacing current fossil-fuel-derived carbon electrodes with electrodes generated from biomass-waste.

Hattie Chisnall, Jesus Vazquez, Mauricio Murillo and Michael Thielke also contributed with talks in areas of CO2 conversion electrocatalysis, carbon dots / C electrodes for supercapacitors, deep eutectic solvents for flow batteries and sustainable electrodes for flow batteries, respectively. Carlos Mingoes presented a poster on 3D-printed electrodes for flow batteries.