Yifei Mo

Yifei Mo

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland.

MSE Researchers Discover New Materials, New Research Direction for High-energy Li-metal Batteries

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Published:

Lithium metal packs lithium atoms far more densely than conventional graphite anodes, making it the most attractive anode material for high-energy batteries — but its strongly reducing nature degrades most electrolytes over time, causing rapid capacity fade.

Professor Yifei Mo, with Ph.D. students Yizhou Zhu and Xingfeng He, ran quantum mechanical calculations across a large-scale materials database to screen for materials that stay stable against lithium metal. Unlike the oxides, sulfides, and halides typically used to protect lithium anodes, nitrides turned out to have a natural, thermodynamically intrinsic resistance to reduction by lithium.

“We discovered that nitrides exhibit unique thermodynamically intrinsic stability.” — Yifei Mo

The finding points to a new research direction: using nitride materials and nitrogen doping to stabilize lithium metal anodes, a step toward higher-energy rechargeable batteries for applications like long-range electric vehicles.

The work, “Strategies Based on Nitride Materials Chemistry to Stabilize Li Metal Anode,” is published in Advanced Science (DOI: 10.1002/advs.201600517).

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.