A professor and researcher at the University of Waterloo has received the highest recognition in Canada for scientific excellence.
Linda Nazar is a distinguished university professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo and has been studying battery materials for over three decades.
She was recently announced as the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for her break-through work in helping develop batteries that are safer and more sustainable.
“I’m deeply honoured to win this award. And I’m also quite honestly humbled to join the remarkable scientists and engineers who have received this distinction before me,” she told CBC News.
According to a news release from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Nazar’s “world-leading discoveries have transformed the science of electrochemical energy storage, laying the foundation for safer, more efficient batteries that are helping accelerate the global shift to clean transportation and renewable energy.”
The award also comes with $1 million in funding over five years.
Nazar has led breakthrough research surrounding lithium-sulfur batteries and more recently, on solid-state batteries. She says solid-state batteries offer “much better safety” than liquid-state batteries, which are most common in every-day life.
How to tell whether your lithium batteries are a fire risk — and what to do if they are
Liquid-state batteries, or lithium-ion batteries, are used in cell phones, laptops, power tools and other everyday devices. Nazar says lithium-ion batteries are reaching the pinnacle of their success, and she is working with her team to make a new generation of batteries to take over.
This includes solid-state batteries, which use solid electrolytes rather than liquid electrolytes. She says the solid state is safer because liquid electrolytes are flammable and can burst into flames. Nazar says the solid state has a wider temperature operation.
“They can be used, for example, in drones which are flying at higher elevations where it’s really cold. They can be used in the Arctic more efficiently. They can be used in the military because they’re safer,” said Nazar.
Solid-state batteries can also hold more energy. “You can get a higher energy density out of that configuration of the battery because you can pack the the cells more effectively with, it’s called a bipolar stacking,” said Nazar.
Over the past three decades, Nazar has led pioneering work on different kinds of battery material, including lithium-sulfur batteries and lithium-ion phosphate.
She says her team contributed to the early understanding of lithium-ion phosphate battery materials, and it’s now “used in the automobile industry heavily, it’s one of the most popular battery materials.”
Throughout her career, she’s worked on magnesium, sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries.
Now, she’s working on a new project involving aqueous batteries, which use water as an electrolyte, with the Department of Energy out of a hub out of Stanford.
Nazar says she became interested in studying batteries when she was a graduate student at the University of Toronto. She says the reason she’s fascinated in batteries is because she’s a materials chemist, an electrochemist and to some degree, an inorganic chemist and a physical chemist.
“Batteries offer … a playground in all of those areas. So they may sound simple to people, but they’re really quite, quite complicated. And so they offer the ability to bring all these different topics together,” said Nazar.
