Dr. Christian Prehal
Dr. Christian Prehal
Lecturer at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
Additional information
Research area
More information: www.prehal-lab.eu
Reducing the ecological and economic footprint of today’s energy storage technologies requires concepts beyond classical Li-ion batteries. Christian Prehal's research focuses on understanding the interplay between individual materials, multiphase structures, and the overall system properties in future electrochemical energy storage. Systems of interest are carbon-based supercapacitors and post-lithium-ion batteries (metal-sulfur and metal-air) or, more broadly, any system with complex physical-chemical phenomena in confined geometry.
His research is based on
i) The development of in situ scattering and imaging methods combined with mesoscopic modeling to quantify the nanoscale structural evolution upon device operation.
ii) The focus on physical-chemical mechanisms and structure-property relationships to derive design criteria for improved device performance.
iii) A holistic systems materials engineering approach: Emerging technologies are put into practice by combining sustainable materials and altering multiphase structures on mesoscopic length scales.
Dr. Christian Prehal is currently a senior assistant at the Institute for Electronics (IfE) in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) at ETH Zürich. He is working in the Materials and Device Engineering Group (MaDE) of Vanessa Wood.
Christian Prehal's scientific achievements relate to either physical charge storage or electrochemical energy storage in the confinement of nanoporous materials. The essential contribution of his Ph.D. in the group of Oskar Paris at the Institute of Physics (Montanuniversität Leoben, Austria) was to establish in situ small-angle x-ray scattering and x-ray transmission for capacitive energy storage in supercapacitors. By combining in situ experiment and atomistic Monte-Carlo simulations, the work provides evidence for supercapacitors' long-debated “anomalous capacitance increase” in sub-nanometer pores. Outcomes of this work resulted in three first-author publications (Energy & Environmental Science 2015, Nature Energy 2017, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2017) and research awards (Christian-Doppler Preis, Fonda-Fasella award, Award of Excellence, all 2017).
Besides continuing activities on supercapacitors and nanoporous carbons (Nature Communications 2018, Carbon 2019), as a postdoc in the group of Stefan Freunberger (former TU Graz, Austria, now IST Austria), he expanded the developed methods to lithium-air batteries. Outcomes of this work explain capacity limitations, ways to overcome them, and generalize the physicochemical reaction model (ACS Energy Letters 2022, PNAS 2021).
In a recent fundamental study on iodide-based aqueous energy storage (Nature Communications 2020), the foundations for non-flammable aqueous batteries were set; with capacity per cathode mass not far from lithium-ion batteries and rate capability on par with supercapacitors.
From 2020, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at MaDE, he explores the nanoscale structural evolution and underlying mechanisms in lithium-sulfur batteries using in situ small-angle scattering, stochastic modeling, and (cryo-)electron microscopy (Nature Communications 2022). At ETH, Christian Prehal supervises two Ph.D. students with projects related to lithium-sulfur batteries. They develop operando small-angle neutron scattering and (cryo-)TEM combined with mesoscopic modeling to identify structure-transport-property relationships. Since 2022, an ETH Career Seed Grant further supports his research on Li-S batteries.
In December 2022, Christian Prehal received an ERC Starting Grant.
As an ETH lecturer, Christian Prehal holds the course Energy Storage which is part of the CAS course Applied Technology in Energy.
A detailed CV with a publication list is found under the link below.
CV PDF
Additional information
A complete list of publications can be found in the link to the CV above.
Course Catalogue
Spring Semester 2024
| Number | Unit |
|---|---|
| 247-0101-00L | Energy Storage |