welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing the science information to the general public this is our website program esteems and when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing tonight we hear about a revolutionary approach to battery design a green battery based on plant chemistry and it's called an organic flow battery our very special guest is allowed sproule music professor of chemistry and chemical biology at harvard university the us prove a research group focuses on a wide range of modern needs including computation information energy and other fields where scientists are exploiting the power of quantum mechanics particular doctor who is sick is a part of an interdisciplinary team at harvard that is developing a green battery his team's contribution is the screening a potential molecules to determine the best candidates for the battery and the solution of lead to the rhubarb battery that will hear about tonight dr oz proves it has received many awards including the technology review innovators under thirty five lists for twenty thirteen and the american chemical society early career ward in theoretical chemistry that same year he's an elected fellow of the american physical society also he is very busy so we are delighted an honored to welcome him to contemporary science tonight welcome sir thank you please begin with a background for us some background information about our conventional batteries were we trying to switch to green their safety and cost i say just before you leave that though is there a problem in terms of the metals for using the metals that a lot of those are rare metals yes or if you want to think about the battery has two things first of all developing the green battery itself that is particularly viable and also the storage because as you mentioned the you have a problem with storage for large amounts of energy gas wind farms and solar rays also capture the sun's power but the drawback is when the winds drop or the sun goes down so does the power michael is easy and gordon researchers at harvard university want to change that they've come up with a new approach to electro chemical energy storage or as you probably call it a battery this is how most of us picture a battery it stores and converts energy in one package but a battery can also look like this with energy stored in liquids and held separate from the actual battery cell this device called a flow battery pumps a liquid past the membrane where a chemical reaction releases the electrons that supply power to recharge the battery the flow is simply reversed and the beauty of this design is that you can scale up the tanks according to how many hours of electricity you need to store which means they can allow winter bins and solar arrays to supply power twenty four hours a day so why aren't we seeing this everywhere cost those liquids are still pretty pricey but as easing gordon have been searching for a substance that could be used to make millions of gallons of this battery liquid cheap and they think they found it instead of expensive metals they're battery stores energy in organic molecules they say they hope to bring large scale liquid batteries to the world in the next few years which means our fuel tanks of the future could be quite different do that you're building a potential difference think about it in some way if you move the electrodes from one side to the all the like moving water open mountain ok and then being able to use the water as it flows down in the same way you know you have your electrons of the same level that's when the batter they have pointed out that like this will be necessary presumably for the offshore wind the siege wind farm off of rhode island now the for the largest in the united states you need something like organic molecules and then following that you contribute something fuge to the selection process so why do you go for plants is there anything about photosynthesis for example or anything like that that really have been involved in actual generation of this kind of reducing the computer and then discussion with our collaborators to actually try to make some of them by and so you are role in that big collaborative thing was to isolate or select the molecules that would be the best candidates is that correct but this is not something that's done overnight at the give us an idea of how complicated it is to do actually say all this is the one that is worth testing and when you finish that process do you come out with say a relative handful of potential ones but we've gone through ten thousand or more evident like right is  other thing is that this appears to be a huge computational task do you would you have been able to do this before modern computer computational capabilities i think people w have been able to do it  they could have done it on i think so i mean the point is human intuition is a most wonderful computer show a lot of the stuff that i'm telling you about would be impossible because we're doing is coding into the computer  molecules to work with and then you develop the actual battery yes and then the next thing is the storage capacity for that that's a given go well the way we think about it is like know it's basically prohibitive if you really want to be serious about energy storage and therefore the process is just basically going for combinations of these materials publishing papers yeah right t the industry to to to try to see the advancement of yes knowledge right but it is a complex process i just want to get another thing straight there that actually extracting the molecule itself ok you selected vol question of putting everything together having industrial adoption there's this companies around there for example looking mighty they are wired by the way a company from one of my colleagues i want to mention that a lot of callie that also works and for a while th and that it is clean for the most part i want to switch it our few remaining minutes here you do a lot of different things as a theoretical chemist is that asking it covers a lot of ground and that's much of this is unfamiliar could you give an idea of one or two projects that you have a particular interest in i know you have a long list of them things one of them is him i'm very interested in basically my general interest are at the front of chemistry with all fields and things that are just perhaps the most striking one was a computer developed by google the superconducting quantum bits recently i b m used their own supercomputer to also simulate molecules that was extremely exciting aha we have used all those types of to create this energy to make it available for everybody basically in the world i think it sounds if you're doing this the green energy then you don't need to install grids you don't  affect not just energy would affect the way you do a lot of things in terms of investigating here's problem let's look for solutions that sounds like that approach exactly the idea is that used to think about the physical world earth as if