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ENERGY STORAGE HEROES: MICHEL ARMAND

Michel Armand has been at the forefront of many advances in
electrochemistry theory and application and made a huge contribution
to our understanding of intercalation compounds. Most recently he has
been at the cutting edge of LiFePO cell optimization.
4
Opening up the space

between worlds

Precocious. That’s about the only way
to describe the young Michel Armand.
Within days — aged just 10 — of
exhausting the experiments from a
chemistry set Christmas present he
was clamouring for more. His parents,
both chemistry and physics teachers,
sighed and gave him the keys to the
school laboratory. An electrochemist
had been born.
Armand was born on April 29, 1946
in Annecy, Haute-Savoie, France.
But it was not until he was 20 that
Armand’s brilliance was to show. Tak-
ing part in a nationwide competitive
exam to enter the Ecole Normale
Supérieure at Saint-Cloud — one
of France’s most respected scientific
teaching establishments — he came
first.
Academically he was on a roll. His
MSc in physics and chemistry was
followed by a post-masters diploma
in inorganic chemistry and electro-
chemistry. Now aged 24, he began to
look for the next step in his education
and in 1970 he obtained a Fullbright
travel Fellowship to go to Stanford
University.
It was a crucial moment in setting a
direction for his life. He was to spend
18 months there in the Materials Sci-
ence and Engineering Department
headed by Robert Huggins and where
Stanley Whittingham, working as a
post-doctorate researcher, was already
making a name for himself.
Armand recalls: “Arriving at Stan-
ford, I was assigned to make tungsten
bronzes to measure the conductivity
of beta-alumina, a clever way to avoid
interfacial polarization. I immediately
realized intercalation material could
also be used for making batteries.

This work contained the first generalization of Nernst equation in the solid-state, to
predict the variation of the voltage with stoichiometry, a model that has remained
indisputable.

www.energystoragejournal.com Energy Storage Journal • Summer 2019 • 61