Electrochemical Systems
Supporting innovative processes in electrochemistry or photochemistry for sustainable energy and chemical production, emphasizing scalability, environmental friendliness, and renewable resources.
Funder: National Science Foundation
Due Dates: July 16, 2025 (CAREER) | Proposals accepted anytime (unsolicited, RAPID, EAGER, GOALI)
Funding Amounts: Typical awards: up to 3 years for unsolicited proposals; 5 years for CAREER; budgets usually support 1 grad student and 1 month PI time/year; larger budgets possible for multi-investigator projects.
Summary: Supports fundamental research in electrochemistry or photochemistry for scalable, sustainable energy and chemical production using environmentally benign and renewable processes.
Key Information: Proposals must comply with the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) or will be returned without review.
Description
The National Science Foundation's Electrochemical Systems program funds fundamental engineering research to enable innovative electrochemical or photochemical processes for the sustainable production of electricity, fuels, chemicals, and other products. The program emphasizes projects that are scalable, environmentally benign, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and utilize renewable resources.
Research should address fundamental phenomena that impact system or component-level performance, such as energy efficiency, product yield, and process intensification. Projects on energy storage should focus on fundamental barriers relevant to renewable electricity storage, transport propulsion, or climate change mitigation. Proposals involving energy storage materials must include testable hypotheses linking device or component performance to fundamental understanding of transport, kinetics, or thermodynamics. Advanced chemistries beyond lithium-ion are encouraged.
The program welcomes multidisciplinary and collaborative projects, including those with industrial partners (via GOALI), and those integrating experimental and theoretical approaches.
Topics of Interest
- Electrochemical energy storage and production/conversion systems
- High-energy and high-power density batteries for transportation and renewable energy storage (e.g., metal anodes, solid-state electrolytes, nonaqueous/aqueous systems beyond lithium, multivalent chemistries)
- Advanced fuel cell systems/components for transportation or grid storage
- Flow batteries for stationary storage (including alternative redox chemistries and operating strategies)
- Photocatalytic or photoelectrochemical processes for water splitting (hydrogen production) or CO₂ reduction to fuels
- Novel electrochemical/photochemical systems for chemical and high-value product synthesis, especially those improving process intensification and modularization
Projects focused on commercially available battery systems (e.g., lead-acid, nickel-metal hydride, or lithium-ion for consumer/medical devices) are not supported.
Proposals should clearly articulate the novelty, transformative potential, and societal/industrial impact of the research, and compare the proposed work to the current state of the art.
