Rohan Koka

Music Engineering and Games

I have participated in battery material research, focusing on synthesizing battery technology for zinc and lithium batteries at Imprint Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

From my internship at Imprint Energy, I wanted to go there as soon as I heard about it through the Cal Energy Corps because it resonated with all of my strengths: 3d printing, material science, batteries, and working in a lab setting. I didn’t think a battery could be printed, and it used Zinc, so it's safer than lithium. Even now, I want to go back to Imprint and finish my project to make a stable water-based electrolyte that gives the battery a longer lifespan than the first iteration I made. During the internship, my primary task was to help research and synthesize a water-based electrolyte that would have better performance and be cost-effective than their current battery during that time.

Over the last two years, I have been a Research Affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) under the Ceder Group. At LBNL, I improved the cathode side of the lithium-ion battery, using a wet chemistry synthesis and other transition metals rather than the standard metals such as nickel, manganese, and cobalt typically found in commercial batteries. I synthesized a minimally impure highly fluorinated disordered rock salt (DRX) lithium cathode material using an adapted co-precipitation synthesis method. I then identified the compound using characterization techniques like XRD and SEM. I used XRD to determine whether the compound was the DRX main phase and SEM to determine whether the fluorine was homogeneously distributed with the crystal structure. In synthesis, I have used vacuum tube furnaces and ball milling machines to synthesize my material. This was my project, and I took the initiative and acted independently to see this project to its completion. I presented my understanding and thought process at the end of each week to my Post-doc to update him on my progress and how I analyzed my results and came up with solutions to resolve the bad outcomes.  I presented this research in a presentation and a thesis report to my advisor and my Postdoc to update him on my research. 

Participating in this field is exciting because I look forward to finishing my projects and seeing where they take me. I have learned much from my projects and hope to use that knowledge for my future career and dream. I aim to make a battery that is sustainably manufactured, efficient, and lasts longer than the current models we have in the modern world. 

On the path to creating a more efficient battery for the world, I decided to major in Material Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. I took Material Production, Properties of Materials, Phase Transformations and Kinetics, and Materials Characterization as core classes for my knowledge of batteries.  

Throughout my courses and internships, I got an opportunity to learn about material science and engineering’s core values: Processing, Performance, Structure, and Properties. Each course incorporated the use of these core concepts starting from the introductory course. In Phase Transformations and Kinetics and Material Characterization these courses especially helped me prepare for graduate studies. In Material Characterization, where that course taught me to use various methods how to characterize different materials. The concepts I learned in my upper-division classes were especially helpful because the methods are directly related to the work. I used x-ray diffraction to identify which materials were pure or not, which supported progress in the research into what I did for batteries. The concept of the battery was based on phase transformations.  When I aggregate all of this information, I hope to pose my research idea and investigate it with the training and knowledge I accumulated.