Yifei Mo

Yifei Mo

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland.

Mo Research Group’s Solid-State Battery Review Published in Joule

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Published:

All-solid-state batteries promise higher energy density and safety than today’s liquid-electrolyte lithium-ion batteries, but progress is limited by a scarcity of fast Li-ion-conducting ceramics and unstable solid-solid interfaces. Computational materials modeling offers a way to probe these problems directly, down to the femtosecond dynamics of individual atoms.

Invited by Joule, Professor Yifei Mo’s group — led by first author and Ph.D. student Adelaide Nolan, with Yizhou Zhu, Xingfeng He, and Qiang Bai — reviewed the state of the art in computational modeling of materials and interfaces for all-solid-state Li-ion batteries.

“With computation, we can directly observe the diffusion mechanisms of lithium ions.” — Adelaide Nolan

The review traces how first-principles computation, requiring no empirical input, has both explained why certain solids conduct lithium ions quickly and guided the discovery of new solid electrolyte materials — work Mo’s group continues to pursue with industry partners toward commercialization.

“Computation-Accelerated Design of Materials and Interfaces for All-Solid-State Lithium-Ion Batteries” appears in Joule (DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.017).

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.