Michael M. Thackeray

Michael Makepeace Thackeray is a chemist and battery researcher who has been with the Argonne National Laboratory since 1994 . He has made a name for himself above all for his contributions to the use of spinel materials in lithium-ion batteries .

Thackeray trained as a chemist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and received his doctorate there. He worked several times for the South African research organization CSIR : from 1973 to 1977 as a researcher in the National Physics Laboratory in Pretoria , 1983–1987 as a group leader in the ceramics department, and from 1988–1994 in a leading position in battery research. 1981-82 he worked with John Goodenough as a post-doctoral student at the University of Oxford ; in 1985 he was again as a research guest in Oxford.

Since 1994 he has been working at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, USA. There he heads a group on electrochemical energy storage.

Work and honors

Thackeray has published over 180 papers, which are also frequently cited. He has received over 25 patents. He has received many awards, including a research award from the Electrochemical Society's Battery Division. For 2016 he was awarded the EV Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry .

The materials discovered and investigated by Thackeray include lithium manganese oxides with a spinel structure. A variant of this type of material is z. B. used on the positive side (cathode during discharge) of the battery in the Opel Ampera .

Hydro-Québec is working on the use of a lithium titanate spinel as an anode material, which Thackeray patented in 1994.

Sources and web links

• Curriculum vitae of Michael M. Thackeray, PDF (accessed May 17, 2012)
• Argonne employees' page, Michael Thackeray (accessed May 17, 2012)
• Communication from Hydro-Québec and Technifin (online) (accessed May 17, 2012)