CHE 598 Seminar: Toward Sustainable and High-Energy Batteries: Designing Functional Materials For Next-Generation Energy Storage
About the event
SPEAKER: Dr. Min-Kyu Song, Associate Professor, School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, WSU
BIOGRAPHY:
Min-Kyu Song is an Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering, with a minor in Electrochemical Engineering, from Georgia Tech in 2011. From 2012 to 2014, he conducted postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy Nanoscience Center. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a research engineer at Hyundai Motor Company (2001–2006), focusing on the development of hydrogen fuel cell systems for vehicle applications. His work emphasizes sustainable strategies for energy storage, bridging fundamental materials science with real-world applications. At WSU, his research group investigates the design of functional materials and scalable manufacturing of nanostructures for emerging energy technologies, including next-generation batteries, fuel cells, and hydrogen production. He has published in leading journals such as Energy & Environmental Science, Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, and Angewandte Chemie, and has co-organized symposia at major international conferences including MRS, ACS, ECS, TMS, and PRiME.
ABSTRACT:
Current lithium-ion batteries are unable to meet the ever-increasing energy storage demands of advanced transportation and portable electronics. Significant improvements in performance, cost, and safety require the effective integration of fundamental materials research, device engineering, scalable manufacturing technologies, and chemical engineering principles such as reaction engineering and transport phenomena. For example, while electric vehicles have significantly extended driving ranges in recent years, achieving widespread replacement of gasoline-powered vehicles will still require energy storage systems with higher specific energy, longer cycle life, improved safety, and greater cost-effectiveness. However, the specific capacities of existing electrode materials, together with the insufficient stability of present electrolytes, remain inadequate to achieve these critical goals.
In this context, our research group pursues several converging directions with the common goal of advancing next-generation batteries: silicon-based anodes that can significantly increase specific energy, lithium metal anodes combined with novel electrolyte systems to address stability and safety challenges, and advanced cathodes such as sulfur- and oxygen-based systems that promise further improvements in energy density. These efforts also include sustainable approaches, such as utilizing CO2 to synthesize functional materials. In this seminar, I will primarily focus on our recent advances in silicon-based anodes, while also highlighting related efforts on novel electrolyte concepts.