CBE & MSE Seminar: From Atom to System – Materials Perspective for Electrochemical Energy Storage

Abstract: A high-energy, long-life rechargeable battery is considered a key enabling technology for deep de-carbonization. Energy storage in the electrochemical form is attractive because of its high efficiency and fast response time. Besides the technological importance, electrochemical devices also provide a unique platform for fundamental and applied materials research, since ion movement is often accompanied by inherent complex phenomena related to phase changes and electronic structure changes. In this seminar, I will discuss a few new perspectives for energy storage materials, including new gas electrolytes, new Li/Na intercalation compounds and new battery architectures. I hope to demonstrate how to combine knowledge-guided synthesis/characterization and computational modeling to develop and optimize new higher energy/power-density electrode and electrolyte materials for rechargeable batteries from picowatt-hour to megawatt-hour. With recent advances in characterization tools and computational methods, we are able to explore ionic mobility, charge transfer and phase transformations in electrode materials in operando, and map out the structure-properties relations in functional materials for energy storage and conversion. Moreover, I will discuss a few future priority research directions for electrochemical energy storage. 

Bio: Y. Shirley Meng received her Ph.D. in advanced materials for micro & nano systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005, after which she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow and became a research scientist at MIT. She currently holds the Zable Chair Professorship in Energy Technologies and is a materials science and nanoengineering professor at UCSD. Her research focuses on the direct integration of experimental techniques with first-principles computation modeling for developing new materials and architectures for electrochemical energy storage. Meng is the founding director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC), consisting of faculty members from interdisciplinary fields who all focus on making breakthroughs in distributed energy generation, storage and the accompanying integration-management systems. She has received several prestigious awards, including American Chemical Society ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Young Investigator Award (2018), International Coalition for Energy Storage and Innovation (ICESI) Inaugural Young Career Award (2018), IUMRS-Singapore Young Scientist Research Award (2017), C.W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society (2016) and NSF CAREER Award (2011). She is the author and co-author of more than 175 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters and four issued patents. She is an elected fellow of the Electrochemical Society (FECS).

Web: LESC http://smeng.ucsd.edu/ and SPEC http://spec.ucsd.edu

Host: Xiaoqing Pan