Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 2 May
12:00 - 12:50
Historically, the properties of ceramic materials for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, solid oxide fuel cells, and other energy-related applications has been investigated by self-consistently averaging the effect of an individual representative material feature and incorporating it into coarse grained descriptions that capture the time-dependent electronic and ionic transport. Such an approach is based on using analytic solutions of simplified representations of grains, pores, and inclusions that aim to understand or engineer the macroscopic properties of the device or component at hand. However, if effects due to phase transformation kinetics, or the impact of defects such as vacancies or interstitials, dislocations, or grain boundaries are to be engineered, currently used averaging approaches will not capture the underlying multiphysical and microstructural richness of behavior of the device. In general, the modern development of advanced technology for energy applications demands: 1) the formulation of a methodology that provides an accurate description of the materials that integrate these devices at each length scale; 2) the systematic and mindful coarse-graining of lower length scale methodologies into higher length scale descriptions, and 3) the establishment of meaningful databases that enable the development of insight to understand and then engineer advanced, reliable, next generation devices. Here, by defining a thermodynamically consistent representation of materials that spatially resolves the multiphysical fields that results from formally considering microstructural features such as grain size, crystallographic texture, grain boundaries, particle size, and porosity, the time-dependent behavior is analyzed in materials for lithium-ion battery applications. Progress towards integrating the physical contributions of each individual phase and its processing-induced spatial distribution into advanced models is presented. The effect on the performance and degradations is analyzed. Reaches and limitations of well-known and emerging theories will be reviewed and compared, and efforts to accelerate to the limit of real time performance and degradation computations will be presented in an effort to explore the space of what is physically possible.
Professor Edwin Garcia, School of Materials Engineering, Purdue University West Lafayette
R. Edwin García is a Professor at the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1996), and both his MS in Materials Science (2000) and his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering (2003) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He conducted postdoctoral work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (2003-2005). Dr. Edwin García joined Purdue University in 2005 as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate (2011) and then Full Professor (2015). Prof. García has coauthored more than 100 papers, 2 book chapters, 12 public and closed source scientific software platforms, one US patent, and 12 patent applications. He has coauthored more than 130 contributed presentations and posters and more than 110 invited presentations. He has been an ACerS member since 2000, and is the current chair of the Basic Science Division. He received the Coble award in 2007, and the Erskine Fellowship in 2013, 2018, and 2024. He was made a Fellow of the American Ceramics Society in 2023. His research group focuses on the development of theories and algorithms to design materials and devices. The aim is to provide principles and guidelines that will lead to experiments and processing operations with improved properties, performance, and reliability. Recent research areas include the prediction of equilibrium and kinetic properties in ferroelectric ceramics, electrochemical properties in ionic ceramics and interactions between charged point defects and grain boundaries, and generalities of microstructural evolution. Current efforts include the modeling of the microstructural evolution and degradation mechanisms in ionic ceramics for structural and energy applications, including rechargeable batteries, electric field assisted sintering, and data analytics of thermodynamic and kinetic properties.