Yifei Yuan

Understanding how battery materials work is the prerequisite toward their rational design for the next-generation rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). While conventional studies on battery materials are costly trial-and-error processes, Yifei Yuan, a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, focuses on establishing a reliable synthesis-structure-property relationship to enable efficient performance advancement.  

It is widely known that a rechargeable battery is not transparent, and it is hard to see what is happening inside a working battery, not to mention visualizing more details at the atomic level. These details are, however, urgently needed in the field to correspondingly design and engineer battery materials with an ultimate goal of commercialization. In this sense, Yifei Yuan smartly built a tiny battery setup using one single electrode particle, usually a nanoparticle, inside the TEM vacuum chamber to achieve high-resolution imaging of the charge/discharge process of the specific particle.  

Inspired by this finding, he was then able to rationally engineer the surface atomic patterns of catalytic particles to tune their reactivity with the intermediate product, via which the overall reaction kinetics of the lithium-oxygen battery are significantly enhanced. Fundamental sciences gained in these studies have been successfully applied during his continuous studies to chemically/structurally engineer nanomaterials to further improve their energy storage property and performance.  

Yifei Yuan has also pioneered the atomic exploration of the well-known tunnel-structured manganese oxide materials and has done a systematic and fundamental study to answer critical questions such as how the tunnel nucleates during synthesis, how the tunnel transports charge carriers, and what strategies are effective in improving the energy storage performance of this type of materials.  

Yifei Yuan's work not only discloses the previously hidden working mechanisms in different battery systems but also provides the battery community with practical inspirations and clues for property optimization. His work is like a bridge dynamically connecting the real-world battery problems with the invisible nano-/atomic scale origins.