Sustainable Energy Pathways: A Lab-to-Market Paradigm for the Optimal Design of Sustainable Energy Storage Materials

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The NSF Sustainable Energy pathways (SEP) Program, under the umbrella of the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative, will support the research program of Prof. Se-Hee Lee and co-workers at the University of Colorado at Boulder to develop a new generation of energy storage materials and devices. The team of investigators includes researchers with expertise in materials science, battery engineering and environmental and economic assessment at an early stage in battery research and development. Energy storage materials play a crucial role for finding a sustainable solution to transportation via electric vehicles. Today's approaches for developing such materials do not account of the complex tradeoffs between various performance criteria, currently used to design batteries, and sustainability goals, including life cycle costs and economic factors. In this project, the team of investigators will adopt concepts from multi-disciplinary optimization for coordinating the sustainability and material design problems. A novel multi-scale modeling framework will be established to predict the performance of 3-D structured electrode architectures and cell layouts. The model development will be supported by fundamental research on the thermodynamic and kinetics characteristics of solid state lithium pyrite (SS-LP) batteries, using advanced experimental techniques. Life-cycle analysis and environmental impact studies will be carried out to assess the sustainability of the proposed battery technology with respect to manufacturing and use. Through coupling research discoveries with ongoing and new educational activities, students at all levels (K-12 through graduate, including students from typically underrepresented groups) will be exposed to the excitement of renewable energy in general and the world of energy storage material systems for electric vehicles in particular. Interdisciplinary, tightly integrated research will provide an environment for educating a new cadre of engineers and economists, who will not only be experts in their disciplinary fields but also understand the broader context of sustainable energy and thus are equipped to lead the design of a new sustainable energy future.The proposed research will create a new paradigm to design energy storage materials bridging the gap between materials research and the environmental and economic impact of technologies in which these materials play a crucial role. The proposed research specifically focuses on SS-LP batteries, a new battery material system with extraordinary properties. The SS-LP battery development holds the promise of a major breakthrough in reaching a market beyond the small-capacity vehicles of urban drivers.