Pooja Vadhva

Background
Pooja completed her Master’s degree with honours at Manchester University in Physics. During which time she was simultaneously competing for Great Britain in taekwondo adding to her academic accolade, British National champion and International medals. Her drive to raise awareness for climate change made her want to pursue battery technology for electric vehicles and she obtained an internship at Jaguar Land Rover in the advanced battery engineering team. She ventured on to help convert electric motorbikes, creating battery pack designs for a start-up company in Bali before wanting to further her understanding in batteries by starting a PhD at University College London (UCL) in Chemical Engineering. 

Research Summary 
Pooja’s research topic is at the forefront of innovation, exploring a new battery technology known as solid state batteries. The liquid electrolyte in a conventional lithium ion battery is replaced for a solid electrolyte to increase energy density, safety and reduce the weight of the battery in an electric vehicle. With Toyota looking to release a solid state car by 2021, and other reputable car companies following suit, an understanding in this area and addressing the challenges at the lab scale is key. Pooja will be using a variety of synthesis techniques to look at novel solid electrolytes as well as assessing the cell chemistry through x-ray diffraction, and electrochemical characterisation through electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), cyclic voltammetry (CV) and cycling data. Extracting electrochemical parameters from these experiments and degradation of the cell using x-ray tomography will help her build an electrochemical model to comprehend the cell reactions further.

Conferences 
SElectrochem Imperial College London, 2019
Battery and Energy Storage Birmingham, 2019
Oxford Battery Modelling Symposium Oxford (Virtual), 2020