BIO

Nicholas is a postdoctoral research staff member at LLNL working in the Computational Engineering Division, and he completed his degrees in Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University (undergraduate) and Pennsylvania State University (graduate). He researches a variety of different green technologies including flow and lithium batteries and carbon dioxide capture and conversion. He focuses on numerical modeling of these technologies to improve fundamental understanding of their mechanisms and identify critical points of development to accelerate their scale-up from bench to industrial scale.

ABSTRACT

The world is becoming electrified, which means that batteries are everywhere! But because batteries cannot be taken apart and repaired, we need to enhance our understanding of battery failure modes to minimize their impacts and extend battery lifetimes. High energy density lithium-metal batteries are plagued by dendrites: a failure mechanism that can cause the battery to short circuit. My research has shown that we can more accurately predict dendrite formation in lithium-metal batteries by including the “solid electrolyte interphase” in our model. This will enable us to better engineer batteries and their materials to control the interphase and prevent dendrites as a form of critical failure in the next generation of batteries.