Office of Research’s Interdisciplinary Research Catalyst: Faculty Fellows Program with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
By Albert Liu
Two UC Davis faculty members have been awarded in the latest round of the Office of Research’s Interdisciplinary Research Catalyst: Faculty Fellows Program with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
The Faculty Fellows program provides funding to enable collaboration with investigators at LLNL in pursuit of large-scale funding and includes a key graduate student participation component. This funding is not only intended to facilitate a cooperative research program into emerging sectors of research, but also to promote workforce development and train future scientists to continue the work and hone developing technologies.
This year’s recipients are Surl-Hee Ahn and Jiandi Wan from the Department of Chemical Engineering. The two awarded Faculty Fellows have formed teams with LLNL researchers and will receive $25,000 to support cross-campus collaboration in the fields of energy resilience and battery technology.
Clarifying charging chemistry
In today’s highly electrified world, rechargeable batteries play a key role in daily life – from personal devices to vehicles, the ability to store, spend, and restore power on demand is crucial to keeping our world running. However, even rechargeable batteries are finite. As batteries cycle from full to empty, their internal chemistry changes, which then results in decreasing performance over time, much like how battery health is assessed on smartphones. To better understand this problem, Ahn is collaborating with Liwen Wan from the LLNL Quantum Simulations Group to study the exact chemical changes happening within batteries and how users might better control them.
As electricity flows into a battery, the electrolyte solution that carries the charge reacts with the electrode terminal, creating a chemical layer called the solid-electrolyte interface (SEI). The SEI can stabilize a battery and enhance its performance, yet it also can create a significant limitation: its continual growth will begin to decrease charging efficiency and overall capacity as the battery continues in service. This translates to a variety of issues that users face, including poor charging efficiency in extreme temperatures, diminished capacity in older batteries, and safety concerns around short-circuiting.
To this end, Ahn seeks to understand the circumstances surrounding and controlling the creation of the SEI, stating: “What we’re trying to do is study the early formation of the SEI to rationally design better batteries.” In collaboration with Wan, the team will apply advanced atomistic modeling with a machine learning approach to unravel unseen chemical reactions that lead to formation and growth of the SEI.
Specifically, the team will predict desired properties based on a battery’s composition to inform targeted design of batteries, achieving improved charging efficiency and longevity. Speaking to the greater goal of the work, Ahn shared, “I’m hoping that our research into SEI formation will help develop the next generation of longer-lasting, safer batteries and benefit the consumer market.”
Reduce, reuse, (rejuvenate)
Consumers increasingly face the conundrum of using a device with a rechargeable battery that operates well below factory specification, especially in smartphones where they cannot easily swap an entire battery pack as they in a remote control. While we can take these devices for a battery change, tossing the old one, is that the most efficient solution? To answer this question, Wan and Jianchao Ye from the Materials Science Division are looking to breathe new life into existing batteries through an innovative process.
At present, when a rechargeable battery reaches the end of its useful life, it can either be scrapped, reused in a less critical function, or completely recycled. However, these options all pose challenges: scrapping batteries is wasteful and can create environmental concerns with disposal, reuse is highly function-dependent and is not always an option and recycling them is both costly and inefficient. For perspective, even the harvesting of critical minerals from old batteries is an extremely limited process – for every 28 tons of recycled lithium-ion batteries, only one ton of useable lithium can be extracted and returned for new battery manufacturing.
Rather than incur the material penalties of scrapping or recycling rechargeable batteries, Wan sees a different solution, sharing, “I will be super excited if we can develop an effective technology to rejuvenate batteries and bring them back to like-new capacity.” Wan brings an extensive background in fluid dynamics to join forces with Ye, who brings expertise in battery manufacturing. Instead of tearing down batteries to build new ones at a loss, the team envisions controlling the internal components of batteries to replenish and restore them. This approach further takes a double-sided approach of working on modern batteries as well as building this feature into future generations of batteries. As Wan puts it, “The design of battery packs will change in the future, but we want rejuvenation to work for current batteries as well.”
The future workforce at work
A key component of the Faculty Fellows Program is an emphasis on graduate student training. As Ahn and Wan’s teams set out on their respective projects, their graduate students will acquire the skills to maintain and further develop these resultant technologies. “One of my students developed a machine learning force field to study gold nanoclusters confined in zeolite pores, which can be useful catalysts for CO oxidation, and he will get to do similar work in a different context, or for lithium-ion batteries, with Wan at LLNL,” said Ahn. Similarly Wan shared “My student will test preliminary ideas at UC Davis before conducting experiments on a larger scale at Livermore.”
Historically, UC Davis and LLNL have been close collaborators on education, with UCD students and researchers acquiring new skills by working at LLNL, and LLNL staff having the option to enroll in UCD graduate programs while working at the Lab.
About the Faculty Fellows Program
The Faculty Fellows Program is the latest development in an extensive history of UC Davis engagement with the National Laboratories. Campus faculty, students, and researchers have joined the Office of Research in attending joint workshops and meetings across multiple National Labs. In 2025, the Office of Research has collaborated with LLNL on a Research Symposium on climate, energy, and materials, as well as a topic-specific microbiome workshop.
Photo credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
