The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering is pleased to present a seminar with guest speaker, Dr. Shirley Meng from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Meng will present a seminar titled, "All Solid State Battery - A Platform for New Materials Discovery and Design."

ABSTRACT: Compared with their liquid-electrolyte analogues, Solid state electrolytes SSEs have drawn increased attention as they promote battery safety, exhibit a wide operational temperature window, and improve energy density by enabling Li metal as anode materials for next-generation lithium-ion batteries. Despite suitable mechanical properties to prevent Li dendrite penetration, relatively wide electrochemical stability windows, comparable ionic conductivities, and intrinsic safety, most SSEs are found to be thermodynamically unstable against Li metal, where SSE decomposition produces a complex interphase, analogous to the SEI formed in liquid electrolyte systems. An ideal passivation layer should consist of ionically conductive but electronically insulating components to prevent the SSE from being further reduced. The past four decades have witnessed intensive research efforts on the chemistry, structure, and morphology of the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) in Li-metal and Li-ion batteries (LIBs) using liquid or polymer electrolytes, since the SEI is considered to predominantly influence the performance, safety and cycle life of batteries. All-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) have been promoted as a highly promising energy storage technology due to the prospects of improved safety and a wider operating temperature range compared to their conventional liquid electrolyte-based counterparts. While solid electrolytes with ionic conductivities comparable to liquid electrolytes have been discovered, fabricating solid-state full cells with high areal capacities that can cycle at reasonable current densities remains a principal challenge. Silicon anode offers a possibility to overcome the challenges that lithium metal anode faces. In this talk, we will highlight solutions to these existing challenges and several directions for future work are proposed.

Dr. Y. Shirley Meng is a Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She serves as the Chief Scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Meng is the director of Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), an innovation hub funded by US Department of Energy, Office of Science.

She is the principal investigator of the research group - Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), that was established at University of California San Diego since 2009. She held the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at UC San Diego from 2017-2022 and founded the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) in 2016. Dr. Meng received several prestigious awards, including ACS Research Excellence in Electrochemistry (2024), ECS Battery Division Research Award (2023), the C3E technology and innovation award (2022), the Faraday Medal of Royal Chemistry Society (2020), International Battery Association IBA Research Award (2019), Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Finalist (2018), C.W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society (2016) and NSF CAREER Award (2011). Dr. Meng is elected Fellow of Electrochemical Society (FECS), Fellow of Materials Research Society (FMRS) and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is the author and co-author of more than 320 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters and eight issued patents. Dr. Meng received her Ph.D. in Advance Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005. She received her bachelor's degree in Materials Science with first class honor from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore in 2000.

Bagels served at 9:30am, seminar to start at 9:40am.