Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On June 25, 2023, John B. John Bannister Goodenough, Nobel laureate in chemistry, American materials scientist, solid-state physicist and one of the founders of lithium batteries, died at the age of 100.

Gudinav is known as the "father of lithium battery" by the industry, and he is the developer of lithium battery cathode materials such as lithium cobalt, lithium iron phosphate and so on. In 2019, Gudinav won the Nobel Prize in chemistry with American chemist M. Stanley Whittingham and Japanese chemist Akira Yoshino for their contributions to the development of lithium batteries.

Gudinav: in front of a college student in Texas, Gudinav once said, "I want to solve the car problem." I want car exhaust to disappear from highways around the world. I wish I could see this day before I die. "

His unfulfilled last wish may become a reality in our country step by step.

New energy vehicles are the inevitable choice to reduce pollution and carbon and eliminate "automobile exhaust". The production and sales of new energy vehicles in China have ranked first in the world for eight consecutive years.

The future of new energy vehicles in China is also very broad. Zhang Yongwei, vice chairman and secretary-general of the China Electric vehicle Association of 100, said that the overall market size of new energy vehicles in China is expected to reach 10 million in 2023, and the penetration rate will increase to nearly 40%. Wang Qing of the Market economy Research Institute of the National Research Center predicts that the substitution effect of new energy vehicles on fuel vehicles is getting stronger and stronger, and the market share of new energy vehicles will reach 90% by 2030. Zhu Huarong, chairman of Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., Ltd., said as early as 2022 that China's automobile industry has initially met the basic conditions for stopping the sale of (pure) fuel vehicles.

Gudinave has a deep relationship with China.

China's BYD has made a great contribution to the lithium iron phosphate battery, which can make the "car exhaust" disappear. In 2003, BYD, which has been making lithium batteries, saw the future of electric cars and decided to switch to making cars despite opposition in the capital markets, betting on the lithium iron phosphate battery developed by Gudinav. Today, BYD has become the world's largest new energy car company.

In 2019, when the foundation of Ningde era 21C Innovation Laboratory was laid, Gudinav specially sent a congratulatory letter expressing his appreciation to Ningde era and other Chinese enterprises for "reducing people's dependence on fossil fuels around the world."

The source of Gudinav's congratulatory letter to the Ningde era: when Gudinav died in the Ningde era, he had reached the age of 100, which can be said to be a long life. Throughout his life experience, every step of his life seems to be a big step behind others. He switched to lithium batteries at the age of 54 and found that lithium cobalt oxide was more suitable as a cathode material for lithium batteries at the age of 58. He didn't develop lithium iron phosphate batteries until he was 75, and he didn't develop all-solid-state batteries until he was 94 years old. When he won the Nobel Prize, he was already 97 years old, and he was the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history.

However, as he said: "be a tortoise that climbs the longest, keep learning and be curious, even if you slow down and encounter a little difficulty, as long as you can reach the finish line." It is never too late to start life.

Focusing on the death of Gudinav at the age of 100, this paper tries to answer three questions.

1. What was Gudinav's experience in the first half of his life?

2. What deeds constitute the second half of Gudinav's late career?

3. What enlightenment does Gudinav's life experience give to future generations?

1. Half of his life wasted Gudinav was born on July 25, 1922. In his childhood, he was unhappy because he often witnessed the tense relationship between his parents. On the eve of his college entrance examination, his parents divorced. Although he was eventually admitted to Yale, he was stretched by an annual tuition fee of $900 because he only got $35 from his father. As a last resort, I had to rely on scholarships and tutoring to collect the tuition fees.

In college, Gudinav may be very confused, changed three or four majors, tried to major in classical literature, philosophy and mathematics, and finally got a bachelor's degree in mathematics.

Gudinav graduated in 1944, just in time for World War II. He joined the air force, but instead of becoming a pilot, he was sent to the island to collect weather data.

In 1946, Gudinav retired at the age of 24. He planned to study for a physics degree at the University of Chicago, but was "persuaded to quit" by the university registrar, thinking that it was too late for Gudinav to enter physics and it was difficult to make a grade. Throughout the experience of everyone in physics, Einstein put forward the theory of relativity at the age of 26, Madame Curie won the Nobel Prize at the age of 36, and even Gudinav's mentor Zener invented the Zener diode at the age of 30.

Although Gudinav was bent on studying physics, he got a doctorate in physics. However, his subsequent experience seems to confirm the registrar's prediction at that time. Although Gudinav was allowed to start working on semiconductors at the Lincoln Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked for 24 years without any breakthrough until 1976. More crucially, the 54-year-old Gudinav will be fired by Lincoln Lab this year.

At that time, Gudinav, who was over a hundred and a half years old, was lucky to get an offer from Oxford University, but he changed his profession, from physics to chemistry, and began to study inorganic chemistry. This kind of straddle behavior was eye-popping at that time. However, it was this cross-line that allowed him to start the research on lithium batteries, which laid the foundation for his later career take-off.

At that time, the lithium battery was the first generation, was developed by British scientist Whitingham, but because of the use of titanium sulphide material as cathode material, it is extremely explosive. Gudinav firmly believed that there were new alternative materials and studied it day and night for three or four years. In 1980, 58-year-old Gudinav found an alternative to titanium sulphide, lithium cobalt. This makes lithium batteries more stable and reduces their weight by more than half.

Later, Japanese Sony chemists developed a graphite anode material for lithium batteries, which matched perfectly with the cathode material developed by Gudinav, and developed a new type of lithium battery. Sony and other companies have widely commercialized this kind of battery in wireless electronic products such as camcorders, laptops, mobile phones and so on.

2. Although Gudinav, a late bloomer, has made achievements in Oxford University, Oxford University has a tradition of compulsory retirement at the age of 65. Gudinav refuses to accept the old and is still obsessed with research. he believes that the lithium cobalt oxide battery he has developed has many shortcomings, such as poor safety, high cost, short life, and so on, which need to be improved.

So, the year before he retired, at the age of 64, Gudinav moved to Texas to continue his research.

At present, it seems that the whole consumer electronics and new energy automobile industry should thank him for his "not admitting defeat" and job-hopping. It was later research that led Gudinav to discover lithium iron phosphate cathode materials, which are cheaper and safer than previous lithium cobalt oxides. At present, consumer electronics on the market, such as smartphones, computers, etc., mostly use lithium iron phosphate batteries. More importantly, lithium iron phosphate batteries "get on the bus", so that today's new energy vehicles can be developed rapidly.

This brilliant achievement, for Gudinav, is not easy, it comes from more than ten years of long research. It was not until 1997 that the 75-year-old Gudinav discovered lithium iron phosphate as a cathode material.

Today, it seems that the research and development of lithium iron phosphate battery plays an important role. It was not until a decade later, however, that Gudinav began to reap honors. In 2009, Gudinav won the Fermi Award and the John B.Goodenough Award, which was issued by the Royal Chemical Society and named after him. In 2013, he also received the National Science Medal personally awarded by former US President Obama.

At that time, many academics thought that Gudinav's research and development on lithium batteries was enough to win the Nobel Prize. In 2017, an open letter entitled "John Gudinav deserves a Nobel Prize" (Open Letter:John Goodenough Deserves A Nobel Prize) appeared on CleanTechnica.

After a few more years, in 2019, the 97-year-old Gudinav was finally recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, along with Whitingham and Akira Yoshino, three scientific giants, for their contributions to the research and development of lithium batteries. shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry. As a result, he became the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history.

This belated award is enough to make Gudinav make history.

It's just that Gudinav is still obsessed with science, and even if he gets honors, he doesn't want to retire and continues to engage in energy research. Supported by faith, Gudinav, who is in his nineties, led a team of engineers to create a new type of low-cost all-solid-state battery. The new battery has at least three times the energy density of today's lithium-ion batteries, is non-flammable, has a longer cycle life, and the charging rate has been greatly reduced from a few hours to just a few minutes.

3. Fame and wealth are light and rich now. Throughout Gudinav's life, he was a late bloomer, but it is still enough for future generations to worship. Its tireless research spirit is worth learning for future generations.

Gudinav's life of scientific research can be described as a typical example of "sitting on the bench". He sat on the bench for several years, more than a decade, or even more than 20 years without a breakthrough. However, he was not discouraged at all. Even in the face of unemployment and compulsory retirement, he still persisted in his research. Even at an advanced age, after winning the highest honor, the Nobel Prize, he still plunged into the laboratory.

What is more valuable is that Gudinav's style of indifference to fame and wealth all his life is very consistent with the traditional morality of the Chinese nation.

As early as the 1980s, Gudinav developed lithium cobalt oxide batteries. At that time, Oxford University refused to apply for a patent on the grounds that it had poor application prospects, which made it easy for Sony to buy the technology, thus successfully commercializing it and making huge profits in the field of consumer electronics.

But Gudinav didn't make any money out of it. He just said calmly afterwards, "anyway, when I did this, I didn't know it would be so valuable. I just knew that this was what I was supposed to do."

The market scale of the lithium iron phosphate battery developed by Gudinav is even huge. in 2022 alone, according to a report released by the international market research institute MarketsandMarkets, the global market size of lithium iron phosphate battery has reached 13 billion US dollars and will be growing rapidly in the future. Especially with the rapid development of energy storage track, the demand for lithium iron phosphate battery will be increasing.

However, this did not bring much income to Gudnauf. At that time, when Gudinav was still improving the lithium iron phosphate battery, the Japanese companies that got the news did not hesitate to send commercial spies to infiltrate Gudinav's laboratory and steal the lithium iron phosphate battery technology before Gudinav applied for a patent. After Gudinav found out, he hurriedly asked his university of Texas to apply for a patent in the United States.

As a researcher, Gudinav is not good at maintaining his own patented technology. He granted the patent directly to the University of Texas, which sold the patent to Germany's Southern Chemical and Canada's Quebec Hydro. The two companies are very good at business wars and have started a long patent war, so they have made a lot of money.

But this income has nothing to do with Gudinav. In 2018, the media asked Gudinav if he regretted handing over the patented technology. "I never thought it would be so valuable," he said. "all I wanted was to make a battery and make an electric car comparable to the internal combustion engine."

Today, China's electric vehicle technology and market scale are among the world's largest, and the future potential is huge, which is a comfort to this scientific master.

Gudinav is worthy of our respect and study!

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: che Bai think Tank (ID:EV100_Plus). Author: Chen Zhongshan.

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