Peng Bai, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis

Analytical Electrochemical Engineering of Safe and Sustainable Batteries

ABSTRACT: Batteries are ubiquitous in our daily life. Developing new rechargeable batteries with more sustainable materials, eliminating the safety risks, and realizing higher capacity and longer cycle life have become an urgent need. Achieving such a goal not only requires precision engineering of multiple components under a holistic design principle, but also needs reliable controlling of many coupled physical processes during battery charge and discharge. Analytical yet predictive understandings are the key to success. In my research group, we combine unique operando experiments with new mathematical models to reveal the true local working dynamics in batteries that are hard to be detected otherwise. In this seminar, we will highlight the importance of spatiotemporal heterogeneities in different parts and at different interfaces of batteries. We will introduce our recent breakthroughs in the theoretical understanding of ion transport and interfacial instabilities of alkali metal anodes in various electrolytes. We will also show that, through the intimate combination of operando experiments and mathematical analysis, we discovered an autonomous interplay between reaction-induced phase transformation instabilities and the reaction heterogeneities at a spatial resolution that was only possible by using synchrotron X-ray based methods. Benefited from our analytical investigations, we developed an anode-free sodium metal battery with a performance comparable with lithium ion batteries but at a much lower cost, therefore, providing a much safer and more sustainable alternative energy storage technology.
 

BIO: Jointly trained at MIT and Tsinghua University, Professor Bai obtained his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2012. He continued his research in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT as a postdoctoral associate, then senior postdoctoral associate and research scientist, prior to joining Washington University in St. Louis as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2017. With his expertise in physics-based mathematical modeling and analytical electrochemistry, Professor Bai has published original research in scientific journals including Science, Nature Communications, Energy & Environmental Science, Nano Letters, etc. His unique contributions earned him the Oronzio and Niccolò De Nora Foundation Young Author Prize from the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE) in 2014, and the ISE Prize for Electrochemical Materials Science in 2018.

Peng Bai, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis

Analytical Electrochemical Engineering of Safe and Sustainable Batteries

ABSTRACT: Batteries are ubiquitous in our daily life. Developing new rechargeable batteries with more sustainable materials, eliminating the safety risks, and realizing higher capacity and longer cycle life have become an urgent need. Achieving such a goal not only requires precision engineering of multiple components under a holistic design principle, but also needs reliable controlling of many coupled physical processes during battery charge and discharge. Analytical yet predictive understandings are the key to success. In my research group, we combine unique operando experiments with new mathematical models to reveal the true local working dynamics in batteries that are hard to be detected otherwise. In this seminar, we will highlight the importance of spatiotemporal heterogeneities in different parts and at different interfaces of batteries. We will introduce our recent breakthroughs in the theoretical understanding of ion transport and interfacial instabilities of alkali metal anodes in various electrolytes. We will also show that, through the intimate combination of operando experiments and mathematical analysis, we discovered an autonomous interplay between reaction-induced phase transformation instabilities and the reaction heterogeneities at a spatial resolution that was only possible by using synchrotron X-ray based methods. Benefited from our analytical investigations, we developed an anode-free sodium metal battery with a performance comparable with lithium ion batteries but at a much lower cost, therefore, providing a much safer and more sustainable alternative energy storage technology.
 

BIO: Jointly trained at MIT and Tsinghua University, Professor Bai obtained his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2012. He continued his research in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT as a postdoctoral associate, then senior postdoctoral associate and research scientist, prior to joining Washington University in St. Louis as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2017. With his expertise in physics-based mathematical modeling and analytical electrochemistry, Professor Bai has published original research in scientific journals including Science, Nature Communications, Energy & Environmental Science, Nano Letters, etc. His unique contributions earned him the Oronzio and Niccolò De Nora Foundation Young Author Prize from the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE) in 2014, and the ISE Prize for Electrochemical Materials Science in 2018.