Hi all,

Tomorrow Danny will speak at group meeting - see below for his title and abstract. Part of it will be practice for a talk at ACS next week.

Otherwise, we're a little short on group meeting speakers - if you have a talk you'd like to give, or have someone visiting (whether Toronto- or Boston-side), please let me know :)

All the best,

Ian

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Title: Status and Challenges of Organic Aqueous Redox Flow Battery Development

Abstract: I will cover the challenges and developments of our group's collaboration with Mike Aziz and Roy Gordon on organic redox flow batteries. First I will tell the story about the initial promise of 2-5-dihydroxy benzoquinone (DHBQ). Then, there will be a riveting tale about how (slightly-altered) proposed substitutions on DHBQ initially meant to suppress semi-quinone formation were transferred over to anthraquinones to create 4,4′-((9,10-anthraquinone-2,6-diyl)dioxy)dibutyrate (known as 2-6 DBEAQ), which the group has branded "Methuselah." The twist is that primary the reason it is the most stable organic alkaline flow battery molecule is not what we initially thought and this is leading to an interesting follow-up study. I will then discuss our group's recent efforts to take a second look at phenazines and fused phenazines, motivated by a recent study published by PNNL. Finally, I will discuss a machine learning approach to explore restricted regions of chemical space to discover new flow battery electrolytes, which is the subject for my ACS talk next week.