Professor Melanie Britton is a world-leader in chemical imaging, using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to look inside materials under working conditions, from batteries to consumer products. She develops and applies magnetic resonance techniques to explore systems that are in constant change and essential to developing clean energy, more sustainable consumer products, preventing corrosion and improved medical diagnostics. Her lab bridges chemistry, engineering, and physics to reveal atomic-level processes that drive the macroscopic behaviour of materials.

Why use MRI to study materials and chemical processes?

MRI gives us a non-invasive way to see inside complex materials while they’re working. It
tells us not just what’s there, but how things move, flow, and react – all in real time. That’s incredibly powerful for understanding systems like batteries or reaction engineering, where composition and transport are intertwined, and change rapidly over time. MRI is able to map the chemical and physical environment of mole- cules, as well as probe their flow and diffusion; thus, providing dynamic, spatially resolved information not accessible using other ana- lytical techniques, such as X-ray diffraction or tomography.

What does MRI of a working battery look like in practice?

In one of our recent projects, we used sodium- 23 MRI to image sodium-ion batteries in oper- ation. We placed the battery inside a magnet, and cycled it using an external power supply. As the battery charged and discharged, we could see the Na+ ions move through the electrolyte and electrodes. The NMR signal shifts depend- ing on the local environment of the sodium ions, allowing us to track where they accumu- late or deplete. We were even able to observe the formation of dendrites. It’s like watching the heartbeat of the battery and then using it to identify bottlenecks and degradation as they unfold.

You also study corrosion and electrochemical interfaces. Why are those systems important?

Corrosion is a huge economic and environ- mental problem. Using proton MRI, we’ve visualized the early stages of corrosion. We can essentially watch how metal ions dissolve and migrate through the electrolyte. This helps us understand how surfaces degrade and how we might better protect them. We apply the same methods to electroplating, fuel cells, and biomedical implants where surface reactions matter – whenever a piece of metal spends a long time in contact with a liquid that could damage it.

What’s the most interesting and unusual chemistry that you’ve had the opportunity to study with MRI?

One of the most fascinating systems we’ve imaged is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. It’s a classic example of a non-equilibrium chemical oscillator – a reaction that doesn’t produce a single transition, but instead os- cillates, producing repeating colour changes, waves and patterns. What’s incredible is that these reactions can self-organise into spirals, targets, or even chaotic waves, and we can watch those patterns evolve inside a gel orporous structure. MRI allowed us to map how these chemical waves propagate through space in 3D, how they interact with the struc- ture of the medium, and how flow and confine- ment influences the dynamics. It’s uncanny how similar this emergent behaviour is to pro- cesses we observe in biology, neuroscience, and even social groups.