Professor Atsuo Yamada won The Electrochemical Society, Battery Division Research Award

On 11th October 2022, Professor Atsuo Yamada, Department of Chemical System Engineering, won The Electrochemical Society, Battery Division Research Award.

Professor  Yamada was happy to share the lunch table in the award ceremony with Professor Stanley Whittingham, who has won this award in 2002, and now Nobel laureate in 2019.

The Electrochemical Society, Battery Division Research Award

The most prestigious international recognition to one person a year, for battery materials research.

About awarded research

The award is for  “Structure-property relationships in battery materials” covering both electrode and electrolyte research. Particularly, very early stage exploration of LiFePO₄(LFP), Li(Mn,Fe)PO₄(LMFP,M3P), and related materials have simultaneously revealed their promising aspects and performance limit under the firm scientific basis. The LFP-based batteries are now rapidly penetrating the market to be a dominant (>50%) power sources not only for EV but also for huge stationary target. Also, M3P as a high-energy-density version is announced to get into a mass production stage to drive Tesla’s world-wide popular EV next year. Award notification is also for sophisticated electrolyte research that combines computational simulation and machine learning methodology with traditional experimental approach in elegant ways, leading to the identification of several functional electrolyte solutions. Overwhelming new concept, liquid Madelung potential, proposed by a reasonable extension from solid-state science, is physically versatile to explain several scientific mysteries in electrochemistry, including large shift in electrode potential, improved Coulombic efficiency, and apparent huge-activity-coefficient in Nernst equation.

Your impression & future plan

It is really an honor to recognize that international colleagues, including friendly competitors, in the research filed highly evaluate my research activities, appreciating my supervisors, professors, postdocs, students, secretaries, and all related persons who have supported me to date. Meanwhile, I feel strong responsibility to contribute more on the battery research that is truly important for human beings and the earth.