Materials Science Research Lecture

Abstract: Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous in everyday life, and are transforming mobility through electric vehicles, and electricity grid through the storage of intermittent renewables. Metrics such as energy density, lifetime and safety are controlled by phenomena that span enormous length scales, ranging from sub-Angrostroms to centimeters. Despite the significant progress over the past three decades, we still lack a complete understanding of how each length scale connects to one another, and most importantly, controls the behavior of the device. One grand challenge for materials used in lithium-ion batteries, like other hierarchical materials, is to bridge the enormous span in length scales through integration of theory, advanced characterization, and data analytics. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our group's recent activities on addressing this challenge through (1) a bottom-up approach, that is, understanding the fundamental nature of battery operation at the ion/electron, particle and agglomerate length scales, and (2) a top-down approach, that is, analyzing massive set of battery cycling data to discover new battery management protocols. This approach of merging predictive and data-driven design of lithium-ion batteries has already contributed to breakthroughs in several electrode materials, and generated fundamental insights that go beyond lithium-ion batteries, such as on chemo-mechanical couplings, defect-mediated redox reactions, and reaction-limited phase transformations.

Bio:  Will Chueh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and a Center Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. He leads a group of more than twenty tackling the challenge of decarbonizing various energy transformation pathways. He received his B.S. in Applied Physics, M.S. and Ph.D. (2010) in Materials Science from Caltech. Prior to joining Stanford in 2012, he was a Distinguished Truman Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. Prof. Chueh has received numerous honors, including the Volkswagen/BASF Science Award Electrochemistry (2016), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2016), Sloan Research Fellowship (2016), NSF CAREER Award (2015), Solid State Ionics Young Scientist Award (2013), Caltech Demetriades‐Tsafka‐Kokkalis Prize in Energy (2012), and the American Ceramics Society Diamond Award (2008). In 2012, he was named as one of the "Top 35 Innovators Under the Age of 35" by MIT's Technology Review.

Refreshments served at 3:30pm in the Spalding Laboratory Lobby.