The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) will organize this Workshop to be held at ICTP in Trieste, Italy, from 11 to 15 May 2015. 

PURPOSE: 

This workshop will analyze the state of the art in the field of materials for energy storage, identifying its most pressing problems and most promising solutions. Our main focus will be on elementary atomic-scale mechanisms underpinning physico-chemical and solid-state processes such as lithium insertion and diffusion, hydrogen adsorption/desorption, and electrochemical energy conversion, and their computational modeling by current state of the art and foreseeable new tools. 

TOPICS:  

•	Electrocatalysis for energy storage
•	Lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries
•	Metal-air and metal-sulfur batteries
•	Redox flow batteries
•	Hydrogen storage
•	Supercapacitors
•	Advanced characterization techniques
•	Computational modeling

The importance of energy storage is likely to increase in the near future. One reason is the increasing presence of renewable energy sources, most of which are irregular. Another reason is the drive towards alternatives to fossil fuels for the transportation sector. Across these fields, requirements on the storage system may be very different, for example in terms of energy and power density. Accordingly different are the investigated solutions, from the employment of hydrogen as a clean storage medium through the further development of batteries to the investigation of supercapacitors. For all these solutions, a key issue is the development of functional materials able to perform the required tasks efficiently, produced from safe, widely available and easy-to-process raw materials.
Our main aim is to discuss the recent progress and identify the main challenges in the current materials and electrocatalysis research for energy storage. The workshop will deal with materials for electrochemical energy conversion, hydrogen storage, lithium-ion, sodium-ion, metal-air and metal-sulfur batteries, redox flow batteries, supercapacitors, including spectroscopic and microscopic techniques for the in-situ characterization of materials, and computational simulations.