Michel Armand

Michel Armand (born 1946) is a French scientist who is best known for introducing the concept of a rocking-chair battery in 1978. In rocking-chair battery the same type of ion is de/intercalated into both positive and negative electrode during dis/charge. As a result, solution-phase species do not appear in the reaction stoichiometry, which allows for minimizing the amount of solvent in the battery, reduces the battery weight and cost.

Michel grew up in Annecy, in the French Alps, in a family of science teachers. In 1968 he graduated from Ecole Normale Superieure, where he became interested in electrochemistry and batteries. In 1970 he started his PhD studies at Stanford University with Robert Huggins as a Fulbright Scholar. Stanley Whittingham was a postdoc in the same laboratory at Stanford. Armand felt that the Stanford laboratory was focused too much on fundamental studies, while he wanted to develop practical batteries. For this reason, he dropped out of Stanford's PhD program 18 months later and returned to France to finish his PhD at Université Joseph-Fourier in Grenoble.

While in graduate school, Armand was determined to find a practical way to intercalate lithium and potassium ions into graphite. He found, that solvent co-intercalation presented a problem with lithium ions. For this reason he decided to try a solid polymer electrolyte and obtained a patent on this idea. However, the lack of a suitable positive intercalation electrode material prevented commercialization of that invention at that time.

Lithium batteries are electrochemical devices that are widely used as power sources. The history of their development has contributions from many scientists, but in particular without the developments by Professor Michel Armand related to the electrodes and electrolytes the lithium batteries of today would not exist as the foundation for electronic devices.

He runs a research team in Spain at CIC energiGUNE and has had his work published in Nature.