Abstract:

As electrification expands from infrastructure to personal devices, power sources are increasingly expected to operate under highly diverse and often conflicting constraints. Electrochemical systems place battery components in extreme redox and chemically active environments, where trade-offs between interfacial stability, energy density, and power density remain persistent challenges. Introducing mechanical deformation adds another layer of complexity: deformation perturbs interfacial chemistry and transport pathways, and externally applied stress can compromise even baseline electrochemical operation. In this seminar, I will discuss how mechanics can be integrated into electrochemical systems through complementary bottom-up and top-down design routes. Fusible alloys will be introduced as a representative class of intrinsically deformable materials, where the interfacial behavior governs distinctive electrochemical processes. Building from such intrinsically deformable materials and their coupled interfacial chemistry, it enables the construction of flexible electrochemical systems. Conversely, starting from application-defined constraints, a top-down approach co-engineers the mechanical properties of each component with electronic and ionic transport, electrochemical stability, and robustness at interfaces through materials innovations. Fundamental material requirements are embedded from the outset, while feedback loop from system integration instructs optimizations of materials design. Together, these approaches outline feasible routes for incorporating additional physical constraints and applicational demands into electrochemical energy storage systems, enabling more adaptable configurations and next-generation “On-Demand” power sources. 

Biography:

Dr. Xuelin Guo is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. She received her BS in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.

Her research focus on advancing electrochemical energy storage by linking fundamental understanding of energy materials and interfaces with application-driven materials design that enables new device-level functionalities. Her work is inherently interdisciplinary, bridging electrochemistry, polymer physics and chemistry, mechanics, and electronics to create material architectures that preserve electrical and electrochemical properties while meeting physical constraints such as mechanical deformation. Her work aims to translate these insights into strategies for component co-design and system integration that can realize the next-generation on-demand energy storage systems.