(September 11, 2020) Congratulations to graduate student Muhammad Mominur Rahman and Prof. Feng Lin of the Lin Lab for their recently published work entitled “Defect and structural evolution under high-energy ion irradiation informs battery materials design for extreme environments”. The work which appears in Nature Communications investigates the fundamental crystal defect dynamics in lithium and sodium layered oxide cathodes for rechargeable alkali-ion batteries. Accelerated defect and structural evolution under extreme ion irradiation and temperatures reveal the relationship between structural robustness to antisite defect formation energy. The smaller antisite defect formation energy in lithium layered oxides makes them more resilient than the sodium counterpart. The findings can be utilized as a guideline for designing battery materials under extreme environments such as outer space and nuclear power industries. 

The work was in collaboration with Xianming (David) Bai of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Virginia Tech. 

To learn more about the work, read the article here.