half-annual consortium meeting of the GrEEn graduate school for green batteries

Monday and Tuesday of this week, the doctoral candidates of the grEEn NRW Graduate School met with some of their supervisors to discuss the progress of their projects and their future plans. For the first time, this meeting took place in the Faculty of Biology, organised as always by Dr. Simon Dühnen, the grEEn coordinator. We are by now more than halfway through our project. The collaboration between the doctoral students has developed nicely, across the borders of disciplines - not a simple task between electro-chemists and molecular biologist. Our chitosans which have been provided by Rita Weyer and Max Linhorst to different research groups within the grEEn consortium are performing well. But of course, it is still a long way to a successful use of chitosans in batteries to make them greener, more environment-friendly. But given the enormous pressure from politics and industry to electrify transportation, greener batteries are more than urgently needed. Whether chitosan will be a player in this game, we cannot know yet. But trying it is certainly worth the effort. And on the way, we are developing new techniques for the chemo-enzymatic, regio-selective modification of chitosans, yielding new chitosans and new chitosan derivatives. We are confident that these will find their applications in different fields, hopefully including green batteries.