S²AVE Lab · Swansea University
Photos from S²AVE Lab activities, listed newest first.
I’m proud of my second-year undergraduate students. It was a joy to see them bring so much curiosity and enthusiasm to the lectures and enjoy the hands-on electrochemistry practicals I designed. — Rui Tan
During our visit to Edinburgh, we met with Professor Neil McKeown, one of our key collaborators, together with Chunchun Ye. We also met with Dr Peisan (Sharel) E to discuss opportunities for collaboration.
Nadeen Photoshopped Justice (far right) into the photo after he missed the group gathering. 😏
We set up a flow battery testing platform and demonstrated stable cell operation outside the glovebox. The platform lets us test membranes, catalysts and redox-active materials in parallel. We also began exploring different cell architectures.
Rui joined the team’s daily research meeting.
Rui was invited to attend the mini symposium at the University of Bath, where he caught up with old friends and met new colleagues working on different applications of separation science. The discussions helped identify shared research interests and ways to deepen collaboration.
The workshop brought together colleagues from the UK and Türkiye to develop bilateral collaboration on hydrogen technologies for rail and zero-carbon transport.
We welcomed Professor Wei Li, a long-standing collaborator from South China Agricultural University, for a two-week visit. We explored whether light-emitting bacteria studied in agricultural research could be used in a photo-flow battery to generate electricity.
We also met with Professor Emrys Evans at Swansea University and Professor James Durrant at the University of Oxford to discuss how light harvesting and electrochemical energy storage might be combined in a single device.
We got together for Christmas dinner with lab members and two colleagues, Mengnan Wang and Yuanting Qiao. 🎄
That December, we also welcomed Jie Yang, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick, and PhD student Hongqing Hao to S²AVE Lab.
The S²AVE Lab team got together to celebrate Muyang Chen’s birthday. Just a cake, a few candles and plenty of laughs. 🎂
Rui was one of the lead organisers of the 2nd STRIKE Symposium at Swansea University. Professor John Irvine delivered the opening talk. Rui invited Professor Yan Yao, now at Columbia University, and Professor Jiaxin Zheng of Peking University.
Congratulations to Professor Zheng on receiving the symposium’s Faraday-recognised early-career researcher (ECR) award! 👏
Rui gave an invited talk, Membranes for safe and long-life batteries, at the Recent Appointees in Materials Science Conference (RAMS 2025), held as part of the International Conference on Functional Materials Chemistry and Engineering (ICFMCE). He also exchanged research ideas with Professor Ivan Parkin and sought his advice on applying for research funding.
We welcomed the HydroStar team to our laboratory at Swansea University for a tour and a discussion about opportunities to work together.
In April 2025, we secured research funding from the Henry Royce Institute jointly with Anaphite. Rui also organised a small workshop that brought together Swansea University battery researchers and the Anaphite team to discuss opportunities for further collaboration.
Rui joined the group gathering remotely and supervises seven master’s students in China. Their projects explore catalysts, separators, electrode materials and redox mediators for flow batteries. We wish them all the best with their research!
After joining Swansea University, Rui attended a CAPTURE dinner with colleagues from the university and Batri.
At WMG, University of Warwick, we worked with Manoj Krishna Sugumar to build pouch cells and evaluate the performance of our new current collectors. Manoj now works with the Clean Energy Research Group (CERG).
In July 2023, WMG at the University of Warwick invited Professor M. Stanley Whittingham, a co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
It was my second photo with Professor Whittingham. His dedication to research has inspired me ever since I began doing research as a master’s student. — Rui Tan