Yifei Mo

Yifei Mo

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland.

The Battery Revolution

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Fires in phones, laptops, and even a jumbo jet share a common cause: the flammable liquid electrolyte inside conventional lithium-ion batteries. Alongside their fire risk, these batteries also fall short on charging speed and energy density — driving researchers to look for a safer, better alternative.

Professor Yifei Mo’s group uses supercomputers paired with machine learning to model battery materials atom by atom, predicting how they conduct lithium ions and speeding up the search for viable solid-state battery materials.

“What we’re after is ultimate safety, energy density, life cycle, and charging time.” — Yifei Mo

Fast lithium-ion diffusion in solids is rare, and only a handful of materials achieve it at room temperature. By training machine learning models on existing materials data, Mo’s lab — among the first to apply ML to this problem — has helped uncover promising new candidates, filing multiple patents and working with industry partners to bring the technology toward commercialization.

Read the full story at the UMD MSE news page.

You May Also Enjoy

New Oxyhalide Electrolyte Breaks Barriers for Solid-State Battery Performance

1 minute read

Published:

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

less than 1 minute read

Published:

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

1 minute read

Published:

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.