MMAE Seminar - Dr. Jordi Cabana - Understanding and Design of Core-shell Architectures for Battery Electrodes Based on Complex Oxides

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Jordi Cabana, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Illinois at Chicago, on Wednesday, September 13th, to present his lecture, Understanding and Design of Core-shell Architectures for Battery Electrodes Based on Complex Oxides.

Abstract

Controlling the reactions occurring at electrode-electrolyte interfaces is key to long-lasting energy storage technologies, such as Li-ion batteries, especially when pushing voltages of operation to increase their energy density. Extreme potentials reached at the electrodes in a fully charged battery render them too reactive toward the electrolyte, triggering deleterious decomposition reactions. When transition metal ions are present at the cathode, side reactions can also occur through mechanisms that lead to their dissolution into the electrolyte. Classical strategies to prevent these undesired reactions and increase electrode durability generally involved post-synthetic treatments of the cathode powders or the use of electrolyte additives. More recently, new effective options have been added through the demonstration of core-(epitaxial) shell architectures at the level of primary particles. Yet the description of the exact modes of degradation and the means by which these strategies are effective remains elusive. During this talk, tools employed to track the structure and chemistry of the surface of cathode particles vis-à-vis their electrochemical properties will be presented. The power of these tools is maximized by the use of objects of study designed at the highest definition and fidelity, in the form of highly dispersed nanocrystals with conformal shells. The high fidelity ensures coherence in the data and the representative character of the characterization methods, especially when highly local probes are employed. The interplay between understanding of electrode-electrolyte processes and the design of novel cathode architectures will be discussed.

Biography

Jordi Cabana is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to his appointment at UIC, he was a Research Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA), from 2008 until 2013. Prof. Cabana completed his Ph.D. in Materials Science at the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona (Spain) in 2004, and worked in the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University (USA) as a postdoctoral associate. He is generally interested in the physical and inorganic chemistry of materials, with emphasis on redox and transport properties. His research group aims to provide chemistry solutions to technological problems in energy applications, with current focus on electrochemical energy storage, which is critical in the development of a green economy based on renewable sources.