Quick look
Iowa State University’s Steve Martin has answers about the state of his work with batteries and glassy materials. Martin won a major, international award earlier this year that recognizes his engineering achievements.
AMES, Iowa – Steve Martin grabbed his office calculator – “Let me do a little math for you” – and started punching numbers.
“The real challenge is, can you make a battery that after about 5,000 charges has 75% of its lifetime left?” Martin asked.
Then the Iowa State University Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering and University Professor in the department of materials science and engineering, who was honored with a major, international award for his studies of glassy materials earlier this year, calculated a scenario:
A: Let’s say we have 99.99% battery efficiency. After one year of charging and discharging, that’s 96% battery life left. That’s not bad. Over 10 years, that’s 75%. That’s what I’m up against. I have to make a battery that’s so perfect, that every time you charge it and discharge it, it only loses .01%. That’s the same thing as walking from Hoover Hall to Gilbert, north of here about 6 miles, and only miscounting one step.
Q: What are you and your students working on to find those efficiencies and get closer to battery perfection?
A: Perfect surfaces. Now it’s all in the details. We’re working on very fine aspects of what can go wrong in our batteries. In one of our projects, we’re studying how a battery’s three layers go together. It’s like three sheets of paper representing the anode, the electrolyte and the cathode. Those have to fit together, literally, like a book. They’re actually squeezed; they’re really in contact with each other. They have to be, because little lithium ions (charged particles that move back and forth across batteries) have to jump across the interfaces between the anode and the electrolyte and then between the electrolyte and cathode on the other side and they can’t jump across the Grand Canyon. Just for comparison, a gap in the interface no larger than 200 hundred times smaller than the width of a human hair, about 0.7 microns, would be the same as me trying to jump across the widest wide of the Grand Canyon at about 10 miles. The anode has to be a perfect material with a perfect surface. The electrolyte has to be a perfect material with a perfect surface. And the cathode has to be a perfect material with a perfect surface. Now, how do you put them together, so they don’t have a Grand Canyon at any point?
Q: Anything else cooking in the lab?
A: Cost! Now it’s also all about lowering costs. The next big thing we’re working on is funded by the state of Iowa. Big shoutout to the Iowa Economic Development Authority and the Iowa Energy Center – they’re wonderful. They are funding a project my team and I are working on that is based on sodium batteries because lithium is really expensive. We want to see if we can get sodium working as well as lithium because sodium is everywhere – oceans, salt mines, salt lakes. For what you pay for a pound of lithium you can buy a ton of sodium. But the sodium ions are bigger (than lithium ions), and they move more slowly, kind of like comparing a cheetah to a grizzly bear. That’s the problem – we have to figure out how to get grizzly bears moving as fast as cheetahs. And that’s hard. But we can do it. We’re engineers. We just keep working. It turns out we just have to give the sodium ions more space to move, like the “ion channels” in each and every one of the cells in our bodies. These channels are evolutionarily optimized to perfectly fit sodium ions to enable them to move very fast. We are working hard to make similar sodium ion channels in our materials.
Q: Tell us about the Otto Schott Research Award 2026, which you’re sharing with Kathleen Richardson of the University of Central Florida. Sponsored by SCHOTT, an international technology and materials group based in Germany, the award is presented every two years and recognizes “scientific breakthroughs that pave the way for new materials and next-generation technologies.”
A: It has been a true honor to win that award. It means a lot to me. First, because it’s one of the highest awards given in my field of glass science and engineering. Second, it is an award by my peers and represents their recognition of my work as being among the very best in the world. And third, because of the name of Otto Schott. I teach Otto Schott’s techniques, technologies and sciences right here at ISU. Dr. Schott (1851-1935) was a very famous German scientist specializing in glassy materials. He was the first to develop the borosilicate glass family, a glass family called Pyrex. Pyrex is low thermal expansion glass that has been used for many years in chemical laboratories and kitchens everywhere. I use the Pyrex sodium borosilicate glass family as the glass composition system that students in my glass class make every year. We study the very glasses that Otto Schott discovered so many years ago.
