Robert Weatherup

My group works on understanding the reactions that occur at the interfaces between functional materials during operation, that are critical to areas including electrochemical energy storage, heterogeneous catalysis, and materials synthesis. Extracting information about interface structure and chemistry under such working conditions is extremely challenging due to interference from dense phases either side (including the reaction environment). To achieve this, we use a suite of interface sensitive techniques based on electron, X-ray, and neutron probes combined with specially designed reaction environments. This significantly extends the capabilities of these techniques to enable the measurement of liquid environments under electrochemical bias or high-pressure gas environments at elevated temperatures. We aim to use these approaches to establish relationships between interfacial structure and material function in a variety of applications and thus inform the design of improved materials. We further aim to promote widespread adoption of these new characterisation capabilities using both lab-based instruments and at large-scale facilities. To this end, we have close interactions with a number of user facilities including those based at the nearby Harwell Campus (Diamond, ISIS, HarwellXPS).