Junhao Cheng

Industry internshipNear the market

Sourcing bamboo for a battery anode

CATL, internship · 待补充dates

Eight projects between the bench and the market

Bench experiments, devices, measurementsMarket prices, sourcing, portfolios

  1. Acoustofluidic devicesDuke · 2025–26
  2. Respiratory diagnosticsSEFH · 2025–26
  3. Dual-ion batteriesUT Dallas · 2026
  4. Waste-to-hydrogenSEFH · 2023–24
  5. Host-city modelHiMCM · 2025
  6. Battery price covarianceIndependent · 2026–
  7. Anode sourcingCATL · internship
  8. Asgard Assets portfolioWharton · 2025–26

Sodium-ion batteries need an anode material that is cheap and available at scale. One route is hard carbon made from bamboo, which turns a materials question into a supply question: where the bamboo grows, what it costs, and whether a factory can count on it year after year.

The company’s project

  • CATL’s project to produce bamboo-derived hard-carbon anode material for sodium-ion batteries.
  • The company’s team ran the sourcing process and handled supplier contact and negotiation.

What I did

  • Researched procurement routes, raw-material prices and where the bamboo could come from.
  • Compared 15 sourcing options and wrote reports and proposals on them.
  • Recommended a source region based on bamboo quality, cost, supply stability and distance to the factory. The team adopted it.
  • Learned how a sourcing process works from the research side.