Identifying Novel Electrolytes for Lithium Batteries with Materials Informatics

SPRING 2015 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEE 

Emily Ryan (Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering) 

The development of integrated computational materials engineering methods is a critical aspect of the Materials Genome Initiative, which aims to reduce development time for advanced materials. The transformation of materials development from a trial and error experimental process to an integrated computational and experimental process will greatly increase the pace of material discovery and development, from 10-20 years to as short as 2-3 years. This is especially crucial for the development of novel materials that are essential to the growth and development of advanced technologies for the healthcare, defense and energy industries.

In this project, research focuses on the development and use of materials informatic approaches to identify promising liquid electrolytes for high energy density batteries. Materials informatic approaches are being used in a discovery mode to identify promising material combinations for the electrolyte of a lithium-air battery to address the issue of dendritic growth at the anode-electrolyte interface.

This work is funded by a Hariri Research Award made in June 2015.