Yifei Mo

Yifei Mo

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland.

MSE Researchers Publish Series Study on All-Solid-State Batteries

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Published:

Commercial lithium-ion batteries rely on flammable organic liquid electrolytes — a safety weak point behind several high-profile battery-fire incidents. Replacing them with non-flammable ceramic solid electrolytes could make all-solid-state Li-ion batteries intrinsically safer, with higher energy density, faster charging, and longer cycle life. A major obstacle, though, is the poorly understood, high resistance at the interfaces between solid components.

Using quantum mechanical modeling on UMD’s Deepthought2 supercomputer, Professor Yifei Mo’s group studied these elusive interfaces and proposed strategies to improve them, publishing a series of papers — one featured on the cover of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A — with collaborators including Chunsheng Wang and graduate students Yizhou Zhu, Fudong Han, and Xingfeng He.

Papers in the series:

  • “First Principles Study on Electrochemical and Chemical Stability of the Solid Electrolyte-Electrode Interfaces in All-Solid-State Li-ion Batteries,” Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 4, 3253-3266 (2016) — cover feature
  • “Electrochemical Stability of Li10GeP2S12 and Li7La3Zr2O12 Solid Electrolytes,” Advanced Energy Materials, 6, 1501590 (2016)
  • “Origin of Outstanding Stability in the Lithium Solid Electrolyte Materials: Insights from Thermodynamic Analyses Based on First-Principles Calculations,” ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 7, 23685-23693 (2015)

Read the full story at the UMD MSE news page.

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New Oxyhalide Electrolyte Breaks Barriers for Solid-State Battery Performance

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A team led by Professor Yifei Mo, working with the University of Western Ontario and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has developed a new class of oxyhalide solid electrolytes that combine fast lithium-ion transport with strong chemical stability — two properties that have historically been difficult to achieve in the same material.

Advanced Solid Electrolytes Break World Record for Ionic Conductivity

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A team led by Professor Yifei Mo, together with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has pushed the ionic conductivity of halide solid electrolytes to a new record by strategically tuning how anions move within the crystal lattice.

New, Superfast Method for Ceramic Manufacturing Could Open Door to AI-Driven Materials Discovery

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Conventional ceramic sintering — the firing step that hardens ceramic materials — typically takes hours, a bottleneck for developing new solid-electrolyte and other functional ceramics. A UMD team led by Professor Liangbing Hu reinvented the process into an ultrafast high-temperature sintering method, sandwiching a pressed ceramic pellet between carbon strips that heat it by radiation and conduction to temperatures up to 3,000°C in under 10 seconds — over 1,000 times faster than a traditional furnace.