By Nicola Spurling and John Griffin (Materials Chemistry)
In 2020 I worked with John Griffin (materials chemistry) on a successful application for a PhD scholarship to fund dual PhDs (one located in Materials Chemistry and one in Sociology) via the Leverhulme Material Social Futures Doctoral Training Centre. The details of the Sociology project idea can be explored below, though unfortunately we were unable to appoint to this novel PhD post, which was located at the intersections of materials chemistry and social science.
The social lives of batteries and new energy materials
One of the most profound changes to society over the next 20 years will be the replacement of conventional fossil-fuelled vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs) for public and personal transport. The key enabling technology for EVs is the rechargeable battery which is one of the great success stories of materials science, and continues to be intensively developed and optimised for future EV applications. However, many assumptions framing current battery materials research for EVs are based around the notion that present travel demand will be undisrupted, with new technologies providing the same services as their fossil-fuelled predecessors, but in less carbon intensive ways. However, despite the advances that have been made, it is unlikely that EVs will ever match conventional vehicles in terms of vehicle range and ease of refuelling. Additionally, many materials used in current battery technology are either toxic, difficult to recycle, or increasingly scarce, and it is unlikely that current battery chemistries will be sufficiently sustainable to support a full-scale global switch to EVs (at least not whilst it is framed as a replacement for the private car).
Moreover, analyses of transport and society show that demand for travel is changing anyway, with emergent (in some places reduced) patterns of car ownership and use which confound the expectations of traditional transport planning methods (e.g., due to the impact of online shopping, urban living, and generational change). There is therefore a significant opportunity to develop understanding of the multiple socio-technical lives that future batteries might have and use this to inform the materials development process. Such futures would include the inherent limitations of next-generation battery chemistries, which will inevitably shape how vehicles are used. In turn, these social futures will also frame our ideas of the desirable properties of future battery technologies and by default, the criteria which new energy materials seek to achieve.
In this combined PhD project, we aim to bridge the gap between materials and social sciences to develop a new approach towards materials development. We will focus on the EV and the battery that underpins it as a highly pertinent example of an emerging technology within a rapidly changing landscape of social practices and with evolving material constitutions and properties. We aim to address the inherent disconnect between the actions of materials scientists, who are often driven by short term targets within the context of current social practices (e.g., to increase battery capacity for larger EV range), and the approaches of social scientists who can identify alternative socio-technical arrangements and emergent social trends and propose alternative, evidence-based starting assumptions for materials science.
Nicola Spurling 