Welcome back everyone. I'm Jordan Giesige, and this is The Limiting Factor. Today
we're going to be talking about Shirley Meng from the University of California
San Diego. Shirley's lab specializes in developing
the materials we need to create low-cost high performance batteries. These
batteries will open the door to technologies such as truly long range
affordable vehicles and electric jets. This is our battery playground. This is
where we are now. This is Shirley's current target. And this is where her
research will eventually take us. So let's take a look at Shirley and her lab,
her focus, findings, and what those findings could mean for battery
technology in the next three years and beyond.
Shirley Meng is a professor of nano engineering and the lead investigator at
UC San Diego's battery laboratory. Since gaining her PhD in 2005 she quickly
became a key player in battery research by founding the Sustainable Power and
Energy Center. She's also taken on multiple reviewer and editor positions
and is a fellow of the electrochemical Society.
Finally the kicker is that she is mentored and advised by two titans in
the battery research field: Stanley Whittingham and John Goodenough, who both
received a Nobel Prize for their work on inventing the lithium ion battery.
Shirley set up the sustainable power and energy center to solve the battery
problem in a multidisciplinary way. Building a better battery is one of the
most difficult and pressing problems in science today and her lab uses
theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to solve that
problem. Scientists have only recently invented the tools we need to look
inside of a battery cell to see how it works and the artificial intelligence
needed to predict which battery materials will work instead of spending
decades taking educated guesses. The technologies used to look into a cell
are called advanced characterization and the tools used to predict battery materials
are called modeling. By using advanced characterization and modeling Shirley's
team is beginning to solve problems that have been
frustrating the industry for decades. Before Shirley came along the battery
was a black box and thanks to her we now have a better understanding of what's
going on in batteries and how to build them better. Let's take a look at two
examples of characterization. Here we can see some phenomenal x-ray imaging of
particles moving back and forth as a battery charges and discharges. As you
can see the flow of particles back and forth is uneven and there are hot spots.
These hot spots may lead to inefficiencies and faults. Now that
scientists can actually see what's going on they can work out how to make the
batteries more consistent and diagnose failure mechanisms. From here they can
take this a step further and zoom in on an individual particle to see how the
defects in the material change has the charges and discharges
This slide shows that zoom in capability. This is an x-ray image of individual
metallic nanoparticles within the battery. These particles hold and
transfer energy to make the battery work. The green asteroid shaped objects are
images of the particles and the rainbow colored images are measuring the
internal structure of the particles to show stresses. What Shirley's team found
in this study is that as a battery charges and discharges the crystals deform
and develop weaknesses. In other words, the crystals are breaking apart,
which of course degrades the battery. Now that we know this and can measure it we
can engineer batteries that reduce this degradation. In both of these
characterization examples, the tools are helping scientists to understand the
first principles of how batteries actually work.
Armed with that knowledge,
they can push the envelope of technology. Let's take a look at an example of
modeling. When Shirley was at MIT she helped work on a materials database seen
here. And, what you see is hundreds of data points derived by gathering the
electrochemical and physical properties of known materials and then applying
algorithms to predict how those materials would perform. Here is a
technical chart of how this process works. Yeah I'm not going to go that deep.
On this chart, the farther to the right and the higher up
the battery is, the more energy the battery can store. This database is part
of what's called the battery materials genome, because like a living organism
certain groups of chemicals have common characteristics. As you can see, the
materials genome narrowed down the search from hundreds or thousands of
options to half a dozen. All of which happened to be in the genome of oxides,
or chemicals that contain oxygen. What the chart is telling us is that these
compounds store a large amount of amp hours at high voltage, meaning there is a
lot of stored energy. A good analogy for this would be a water tower that stores
a large amount of water at high pressure. The modeling can also be used to predict
new properties, guide synthesis, and bring new battery chemistry's from lab to
market in eight years. The standard is 15 to 20 years. If you combine the work Jeff
Dahn is doing, which was discussed in my last video, with Shirley's work...the next
10 years we'll see us step into a new age of energy. Between the two of them they
are pulling us out of the dark ages by eliminating trial and error and saving
us decades of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. There's one last
thing I want to call out here which Shirley has mentioned several times. This
was in 2017 and she's calling for a 500 watt hour a kg battery chemistry to be
discovered by 2022. "In the next five years, please expect some very exciting
news coming out from the battery 500 consortium." Here's a post from her
Twitter account only a few days ago: "Happy New Year...particularly for all of
us who are working on solving the world's energy challenges. 2020 will be a
big year for us all." Shirley has worked with Maxwell Technologies - Tesla
acquisition. Tesla will be doing a battery investor day on this technology
in the next few months. I think she's teasing us. I will be
talking about this in greater depth in a future video.
In my next video I'm going
try my hand at designing a supersonic vertical takeoff and landing electric
jet. I've seen a few designs out there but I have my own view on how I think
it will look, and more importantly, why I think it will
look that way. If you enjoyed this video be sure to LIKE and subscribe below. I'm
also starting a patreon: You'll find the details of that in the description.
That's all for the day thanks for tuning in!