Reinventing Batteries Through Nanoscience
The next presentation in the Distinguished Lecture Series in Energy, featuring Dr. Yi Cui, the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and the founding director of the Sustainability Accelerator at Stanford University, will be held on Wednesday, September 27, 2023, from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. CDT (UTC -5:00) in the Frederick E. Giesecke Engineering Research Building (GERB) Third Floor Conference Room and through a Zoom Meeting. The topic will be “Reinventing Batteries Through Nanoscience.”
Abstract
The fast growth of power sources for transportation and grid-scale stationary storage presents great opportunities for new battery chemistries. How to increase energy density, reduce cost, speed up charging, extend life, enhance safety, and reuse/recycle are critical challenges. Here I will present how we utilize nanoscience to reinvent batteries and address many challenges by understanding the materials and interfaces through new tools and providing design principles of new materials. The topics to be discussed include materials design to enable high-capacity materials: Si and Li metal anodes and S cathodes; materials for low-cost large-scale stationary energy storage; and a set of tools including cryogenic electron microscopy for understanding thermodynamic, kinetic, and structural information of battery chemistries.
Biography
Yi Cui is the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and the founding director of the Sustainability Accelerator at Stanford University. He is a co-director of the Ecopreneurshp Program, the StorageX Initiative, the Battery500 Consortium, and the Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium. He is the Fortinet Founders Professor of materials science and engineering, and energy science and engineering.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1998 from the University of Science & Technology of China and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 2002. He was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 2002 to 2005 before joining the Stanford faculty. A preeminent researcher of nanotechnologies for better batteries and other sustainability materials technologies, Cui has published more than 550 studies and is one of the world’s most cited scientists with an H-index of 257 (Google). In 2014 he was ranked NO.1 worldwide in Materials Science by Thomas Reuters. He is an Associate Editor of Nano Letters.
He has founded six companies to commercialize technologies from his lab: Amprius (AMPX in NYSE), 4C Air, EEnotech, LifeLabs Design, EnerVenue, and EnnoPure Inc. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Materials Research Society, a fellow of the Electrochemical Society, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. His selected honors include the Global Energy Prize (2021), Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (2021), Materials Research Society Medal (2020), Electrochemical Society Battery Technology Award (2019), and Blavatnik National Laureate (2017).