The charge in your phone, the fuel in your car and the heating in your house. Humanity cannot do without energy. Today, 77% of the energy used worldwide comes from fossil fuels, and the sustainable alternatives rely on elements the planet does not have bottomless reserves of. Professor Dorthe Ravnsbæk will now dedicate her time to this challenge.

"It's crucial that we start looking for new energy materials now, because many of the raw materials behind the energy materials we use today are drastically diminishing. As raw materials stocks diminish, they become more expensive, and this actually slows down the green transition and thus also the possibility of slowing down climate change," says Dorthe Ravnsbæk.

The professor now has an opportunity to explore the challenge in depth with a team of colleagues. The Danish National Research Foundation has granted DKK 59,965,000 for a new basic research centre at Aarhus University: the Center for Sustainable Energy Materials (C-SEM). 

"The grant provides amazing new opportunities that we wouldn't have without it. Now I can gather a team of really strong researchers at a basic research centre and we can exploit our complementary skills to delve deeply into developing new energy materials. We're going to explore whole new territory. I'm very honoured to have this opportunity, and I'm looking forward to getting started," says Dorthe Ravnsbæk. 

The ambition: A brand new and unknown energy system for humanity

Although there is strong focus on renewable energy technologies, with more solar panels being installed, wind turbines growing ever larger and the number of battery-powered electric cars on the roads increasing, it's still not green enough. These technologies rely on unsustainable materials to convert energy into power. 

"An electric car contributes to the green transition because it can run on green power. But we need to get to a point where the battery is also green. This will only be possible if it is based on materials from sustainable raw materials, and that's where we want to go," says the professor.

The challenge is that when you change the composition of a material, for example replacing rare elements with other more common elements, you also change the material’s ability to convert energy into electricity. Therefore, the ambition of the new basic research centre is for the research team to find new ways to produce energy materials that can be made from sustainable and abundant elements.  

"We hope our research will make a huge difference because we’re opening up completely new ways of making sustainable energy materials," says Dorthe Ravnsbæk.

Recipe: Creating chaos from order

The researchers behind the centre want to create new energy materials by following a recipe that may sound simple at first: They want to mess up the atoms in the energy materials.

"Our new approach is to use atomic-level disorder in well-ordered materials. Many energy materials have a high degree of order at atomic level. This means that the atoms are arranged in an orderly pattern. But it turns out that in many cases the material's ability to convert energy is related to a degree of disorder: in other words deviations from the orderly atomic pattern," explains Dorthe Ravnsbæk and continues:

"We want to understand how atomic disorder is related to the properties of a material and learn how to control it, and then make new sustainable materials that can convert energy efficiently."

Chaos from order at atomic level has been a focus area for all the researchers at the new centre in recent years. They have all applied different techniques to study disorder in different energy materials, and while there is still a long way to go, C-SEM is paving the way for research to take a quantum leap towards greener solutions: 

"We’ve already become very good at studying disorder and now we can pool our expertise on different energy materials and delve into the new methods to better understand the materials and find new possibilities," says the professor. 

Ambitious, innovative and potentially groundbreaking research

The great ambitions behind the new basic research centre are part of the reason why Dorthe Ravnsbæk has been granted almost DKK 60 million from the Danish National Research Foundation. The fund supports original and potentially innovative projects that have a high level of research ambition and that are potentially groundbreaking. 

"Only the best researchers with the best and most ambitious ideas can obtain a Centre of Excellence grant," the foundation writes on its website. 

"This is huge recognition not only of me and my colleagues' ideas, but also of the research we’ve done over the past few years. It’s a great honour to be granted a Centre of Excellence grant, and when I look at the list of former and current centre directors, I can see that I'm in really good company," says Dorthe Ravnsbæk.

The Centre for Sustainable Energy Materials is opening at Aarhus University and the grant from the Danish National Research Foundation will cover the research project for six years.

Key participants in Centre for Sustainable Energy Materials (C-SEM)

Centre director and professor Dorthe Ravnsbæk, Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University, mail: dorthe@chem.au.dk, phone: +45 93522528 

Professor Bo Brummerstedt Iversen, Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University

Professor Jørgen Skibsted, Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University

Tenure Track Assistant Professor Espen Drath Bøjesen, Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre (iNANO), Aarhus University