University of California San Diego, USA
By Y. Shirley Meng, Ph.D., Sustainable Power and Energy Center, Laboratory for Energy Storage & Conversion, University of California San Diego, USA.
Lithium (Li) metal has been considered as an ideal anode for high-energy rechargeable Li batteries while Li nucleation and growth at the nano scale remains mysterious as to achieving reversible stripping and deposition. A few decades of research have been dedicated to this topic and we have seen breakthroughs in novel electrolytes in the last few years, where the efficiency of lithium deposition is exceeding 99%. Here, cryogenic-transmission electron microscopy (Cryo-TEM/Cryo-FIB) was used to reveal the evolving nanostructure of Li deposits at various transient states in the nucleation and growth process, in which a disorder-order phase transition was observed as a function of current density and deposition time. More importantly, the complementary techniques such as titration gas chromatography (TGC) reveals the important insights about the phase fraction of solid electrolyte interphases (SEI) and electrochemical deposited Li (EDLi). While cryo-EM has made significant contributions to enabling lithium metal anodes for batteries, its applications in the area of solid state electrolytes, thick sulfur cathodes are still in its infancy, therefore, I will discuss a few new perspectives about how future cryogenic imaging and spectroscopic techniques can accelerate the innovation of novel energy storage materials and architectures.
Biography
Dr. Y. Shirley Meng received her Ph.D. in Advance Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005, after which she worked as a postdoc research fellow and became a research scientist at MIT. Shirley currently holds the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies and professor in Materials Science & NanoEngineering at University of California San Diego (UCSD). Dr. Meng is the principal investigator of the research group – Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC). She is the founding Director of Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC). Dr. Meng received several prestigious awards, including Faraday’s Medal (2020), International Battery Association Battery Research Award (2019), American Chemical Society ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Young Investigator 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). Dr. Meng is an elected Fellow of ECS society. She is the author and co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters and four issued patents.