Nano-chemo-mechanics of Advanced Materials for Hydrogen Storage and Lithium Battery Applications

Abstract

Material failures due to coupled chemo-mechanical effects are the serious roadblocks in the development of advanced nanostructured materials for renewable energy technologies. Currently, hydrogen and lithium-ion batteries are being considered as the promising candidates of efficient energy sources and carriers. However, the adsorption of hydrogen can drastically degrade the structural materials for its containment, and the intercalation of lithium in electrodes often causes the mechanical failures and capacity fading in batteries. These issues arise owing to the large electro-chemical-mechanical driving forces in systems, high mobilities of hydrogen and lithium as well as their strong chemo-mechanical coupling with the host materials. In this talk, our recent nano-chemo-mechanical studies of the hydrogen embrittlement and lithium intercalation phenomena will be presented. We show that multiscale simulations can well explain and predict the experiments of hydrogen embrittlement in grain boundary engineered metals and the electrochemically induced mechanical failures in lithium-ion nano-batteries