MSE PhD Prospectus Defense of Anton Resing

TITLE: Architected Materials to Study and Mitigate Mass Transfer Limitations Pervasive in Electrochemical Energy Storage

ABSTRACT:Electrochemical energy storage has achieved performance enhancements as fundamental hurdles have been met, even while the original planar structure and random arrangement of materials within battery electrodes has remained the same. Together, these two factors amplify mass-transfer constraints and limit the critical charge and discharge rates of batteries. The demanded next step in battery evolution is building designer electrode and cell architectures to improve ion transport rates while maintaining a high energy density. This goal requires reimagined processing methods to move beyond planar electrodes with disorganized and heterogeneous porosity and to create micro-architected three-dimensional electrodes. This research details one such innovative process, hybrid inorganic phase inversion (HIPI), a manufacturing method that is scalable, material-agnostic and results in low-tortuosity free-standing architectures with tunable material-to-pore ratios. First, the mechanisms and tunability of the HIPI process and related architectures are illuminated. This developed knowledge enables a range of architectures which present a potentially powerful tool to establish fundamental composition-structure-performance relationships across solid-state and liquid electrolyte cell types. Lastly, the difficulties and promises of a micro-architected three-dimensional interdigitated battery will be introduced. This cell architecture would increase the power, or charging rate, by a factor of 20 over current state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, while guaranteeing high amounts of energy storage. By exploiting three-dimensional architectures with precisely arranged functional materials, the proposed research outlines a pathway to elucidate and mitigate mass-transport constraints in energy storage devices and decouple energy-power tradeoffs intrinsic to planar cell structures.

COMMITTEE: Advisor Jörg G. Werner, ME, MSE; Sean Lubner, MSE, ME; William Boley, ME, MSE; Srikanth Gopalan, ME, MSE