Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionised the world of portable power and energy storage. They have become an indispensable part of our lives, enabling the widespread use of portable electronics, and the adoption of electric cars.
A major disadvantage of the current technology is the use of highly flammable liquid electrolytes. The development of safer, greener and more efficient energy storage is also central to our decarbonisation efforts. It is crucial for the electrification of our transport systems, and for supporting intermittent supplies from solar and wind energy.
Next-generation batteries will solve these challenges with a fundamental change in battery design – solid-state batteries. The key challenge is to find suitable materials with high conductivity.
Conductivity is hard to predict, due to the need to model the interactions between ions and their collective behaviour. New methods that can provide accuracy and efficiency, and encompass disordered materials, are urgently required and are the focus of my program.
My research uses a transformative computational framework for identifying and then designing solid electrolytes with high ionic conductivity.
My resesarch focusses on quantifying critical correlated motion. Mechanisms for transport are not well-understood because it is hard to identify the underlying science within all the noise. I have developed a unique methodology, EL-Cage. exploiting the Potential Energy Landscape (PEL) to identify the microscopic hopping events that characterise transport, even in disordered solids.
Research Objectives:
❃ identifying microscopic ion transport mechanisms;
❃ quantifying correlation effects;
❃ creating computationally efficient methods;
❃ characterising disordered and complex materials;
and
❃ defining compatible measurements for effective collaboration across computation and experiment