Events Calendar

Speaker: Dr. Corie L. Cobb

Title: Next Generation Additive Manufacturing for Structured Electrode Lithium-ion Batteries

Abstract: Achieving high-energy and high-power density Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) with fast charging capabilities is critical to advancing electric vehicle (EV) and portable electronic technologies. Commercialized LIBs are composed of flat anode and cathode electrode stacks which are optimized for either energy or power but not both simultaneously. This is due to ion-transport limitations that occur with increases in electrode thickness. Researchers are exploring improving LIB performance through material innovations with lithium metal or silicon anodes and high-voltage cathode and electrolyte materials, to name a few. Structured Electrode (SE) and three-dimensional (3D) battery designs have been investigated as an alternate solution to address these challenges. SEs engineer electrode materials into different 3D architectures on a scale ranging from tens to hundreds of microns to facilitate rapid ion-transport in thicker electrodes. While a promising concept, reliable and scalable manufacturing methods for fabricating SEs over the complex areas needed for EV and portable electronic applications remains limited. This talk covers manufacturing approaches investigated by my research group to fabricate SEs rapidly and efficiently over large, complex areas. Both computational and experimental methods are employed to facilitate the development of new hardware, software, material formulations, and processing techniques for SEs, with a focus on new additive manufacturing approaches and their impact on the rate capability and charge/discharge capacity of LIBs.

Bio: Dr. Corie L. Cobb is the Washington Research Foundation Professor in Clean Energy and is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). At the UW, Dr. Cobb is also a faculty member of the Clean Energy Institute and the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute. She came to the UW from Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. where she led research projects on advanced manufacturing technologies for solar cells and batteries. Dr. Cobb’s research lies at the intersection of manufacturing, engineered materials, and computational design for printing and patterning of functional materials for clean energy applications. Dr. Cobb is a recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, DARPA Director’s Fellowship, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award and was recently elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences.