朱冠舟 | Rechargeable Sodium/Chlorine and Lithium/Chlorine Batteries

Dr. Guanzhou Zhu is a Presidential Young Professor (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore, a position he joined in September 2025. He earned his BS in chemistry (Summa Cum Laude, departmental highest honor) from UCLA in 2016 and his PhD in chemistry from Stanford University in 2022, working with Professor Hongjie Dai on rechargeable aluminum-, magnesium-, sodium-, and lithium-ion batteries, supported by a Bits & Watts Graduate Fellowship. He continued battery research as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and, from September 2023, at MIT with Professors Yang Shao-Horn and Ju Li. To date he has published 23 papers, including 9 first-author papers in journals such as Nature, JACS, Advanced Materials, and PNAS.

Developing high-capacity, high-energy-density rechargeable batteries is key to meeting society's growing need for advanced energy storage. Recently developed sodium/chlorine (Na/Cl₂) and lithium/chlorine (Li/Cl₂) batteries converted the primary Li/SOCl₂ battery, invented in the 1970s, into a rechargeable system for the first time. Built with amorphous carbon nanospheres as the positive electrode, AlCl₃ in SOCl₂ with fluoride-based additives as the electrolyte, and Na or Li metal as the negative electrode, these batteries operate via reversible Cl⁻/Cl₂ redox, delivering ~3.5 V, capacities up to 1200 mAh g⁻¹, and 200 cycles. Subsequent advances have broadened the electrode choices to high-temperature-annealed defective graphite, achieved excellent low-temperature performance (up to 5000 mAh g⁻¹ at -80 ℃, far exceeding lithium-ion batteries), and introduced 2D metal-organic-framework electrodes that improved reversibility and enabled a ~150 Wh kg⁻¹ (~325 Wh L⁻¹) coin-cell Na/Cl₂ battery. Overall, Na/Cl₂ and Li/Cl₂ batteries are an emerging class of high-voltage, high-capacity rechargeable batteries with strong potential for practical high-energy-density storage.

Dr. Guanzhou Zhu is a Presidential Young Professor (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore, a position he joined in September 2025. He earned his BS in chemistry (Summa Cum Laude, departmental highest honor) from UCLA in 2016 and his PhD in chemistry from Stanford University in 2022, working with Professor Hongjie Dai on rechargeable aluminum-, magnesium-, sodium-, and lithium-ion batteries, supported by a Bits & Watts Graduate Fellowship. He continued battery research as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and, from September 2023, at MIT with Professors Yang Shao-Horn and Ju Li. To date he has published 23 papers, including 9 first-author papers in journals such as Nature, JACS, Advanced Materials, and PNAS.