Bin Ouyang: High entropy design principles for battery materials with fast diffusion
Channel: NERSC
Date: 2022-12-20

High entropy design principles for battery materials with fast diffusion
 Bin Ouyang, Florida State University

December 13, 2022
11:30-12:00 Pacific Time

High entropy materials promise a lot of opportunities in various structural and functional materials. However, research discussing whether it is useful for battery applications is just rising on the horizon. The first question to ask is, what can “high entropy” do to battery materials? Here in this presentation, we would like to provide a theoretical/computational answer to this question with confirmation from experiments. With great support from high throughput first principle calculations at the world-leading supercomputing platform --- NERSC, it has been found that high entropy provides a) more random atomic distribution that helps avoid the formation of detrimental chemical short-range order that hurts the Li percolation; b) a rich ensemble of local environments that can facilitate new percolation pathways for superionic conduction. The discovery a) has led to the discovery of low-cost battery cathodes that can charge within 10min to reach commercialized Li-ion battery capacity. The discovery b) has revealed a general mechanism that can turn bad ionic conductors into superionic conductors, which creates a new design paradigm for battery electrodes and solid- state electrolytes.