Design and Fabrication of Scalable 3D Lithium-ion Batteries

Technology progressions in wearable devices, portable electronics and electric vehicles have motivated a shift in Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries to accommodate safer, longer-life, higher-power-and-energy materials with more efficient form factors and packaging.  One emerging trend to address this technology shift is the use of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques to rapidly fabricate three-dimensional (3D) battery architectures with customized geometries on a micron to millimeter scale, changing the way engineers conceptualize energy storage devices today.  3D batteries enhance ion transport in existing battery materials, thereby increasing potential energy and power gains over conventional planar stacks of battery electrodes.  However, fabricating these structures over large areas requires more revolutionary changes to today’s manufacturing processes and material formulations.  Using both computational and experimental approaches, our work has shown the potential to increase Li-ion battery energy density and power density for a given application by 10-80% relative to conventional planar batteries. This talk will provide background and context for 3D batteries, highlight my research group’s recent work in computational modeling and AM for 3D Li-ion batteries, and discuss future research directions. 

Dr. Corie L. Cobb is a Tenure-Track Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and joined the University of Washington (UW) in 2017 through a Washington Research Foundation Professorship in Clean Energy.  At the UW, Dr. Cobb is also a faculty member of the Clean Energy Institute and the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute.  She came to the UW from Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. (formerly known as Xerox PARC) where she was a Senior Member of Research Staff for seven years leading research projects on advanced manufacturing technologies for solar cells and batteries. Dr. Cobb’s research lies at the intersection of manufacturing, engineered materials, and computational design for printing and patterning of functional materials for clean energy applications. Her research has been funded by grants from DOE, ARPA-E, DARPA and industrial partners. Prior to PARC, Dr. Cobb was a mechanical engineer at Applied Materials and held internship positions at Hewlett-Packard, Bell Labs, Google and Toshiba. 

Dr. Cobb is a recipient of a 2019 DARPA Young Faculty Award and a 2019 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.  Dr. Cobb received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a bachelor’s degree in Product Design from Stanford University.

Faculty bio: https://www.me.washington.edu/people/faculty/corie_cobb

Lab Webpage: https://depts.washington.edu/infab/