Yanhao Dong

Today, advanced ceramics are infrastructure materials for emerging technologies including informatics and energy. Yanhao Dong, who has been engaged in the research of inorganic non-metallic materials for a long time, has always regarded the development of better ceramic materials as his research interest. He is interested in developing better ceramics and focusing on the fundamentals of ceramic processing science, especially on mass transport and microstructural evolution.

Yanhao Dong clarified the mass transport mechanisms in zirconia, conceptualized the design of ultra-uniform nanocrystalline ceramics, demonstrated unprecedented grain size uniformity beyond Hillert’s theoretical limit, discovered electric field-induced microstructural instability, and proposed new mechanisms of coupled electron-phonon-ion migration and theoretical models of graded chemical potential distribution and grain boundary overpotential. He also focused on interdisciplinary ceramic materials design, processing, and degradation mechanisms, especially in the applications of energy ceramics, to better solve the energy and climate change challenges facing mankind today.

In lithium-ion battery cathodes, Yanhao Dong proposed the degradation mechanism dominated by stress-corrosion cracking, corrected the conventional misunderstanding of brittle fracture, and developed high-performance single-crystalline Li-/Mn-rich layered cathodes. In protonic ceramic fuel cells, he proposed a new concept of interfacial reactive sintering, designed tuned surface acid treatment and co-sintering technique, and broke the world record in peak power density.

Now as an assistant professor at Tsinghua University, Yanhao Dong works on new ceramics with superior reliability and multi-functionality. The goal is to get higher strength and toughness and produce robust ceramics that can support new applications in extreme environments, thus laying the foundation for their application in aerospace, electronic information, biomedicine and other fields.