Engineering topics

Rong, Ziqin

Publications and source records attributed to Rong, Ziqin.

3 records

DOE OSTI2020

Promises and Challenges of Next-Generation “Beyond Li-ion” Batteries for Electric Vehicles and Grid Decarbonization

The tremendous improvement in performance and cost of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have made them the technology of choice for electrical energy storage. While established battery chemistries and cell architectures for Li-ion batteries achieve good power and energy density, LIBs are unlikely to meet all the performance, cost, and scaling targets required for energy storage, in particular, in large-scale applications such as electrified transportation and grids. The demand to further reduce cost and/or increase energy density, as well as the growing concern related to natural resource needs for Li-ion have accelerated the investigation of so-called "beyond Li-ion" technologies. In this review, we will discuss the recent achievements, challenges, and opportunities of four important "beyond Li-ion" technologies: Na-ion batteries, K-ion batteries, all-solid-state batteries, and multivalent batteries. Here, the fundamental science behind the challenges, and potential solutions toward the goals of a low-cost and/or high-energy-density future, are discussed in detail for each technology. While it is unlikely that any given new technology will fully replace Li-ion in the near future, "beyond Li-ion" technologies should be thought of as opportunities for energy storage to grow into mid/large-scale applications.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

DOE OSTI2020

Similarity of Precursors in Solid-State Synthesis as Text-Mined from Scientific Literature

Collecting and analyzing the vast amount of information available in the solid-state chemistry literature may accelerate our understanding of materials synthesis. However, one major problem is the difficulty of identifying which materials from a synthesis paragraph are precursors or are target materials. In this study, we developed a two-step chemical named entity recognition model to identify precursors and targets, based on information from the context around material entities. Using the extracted data, we conducted a meta-analysis to study the similarities and differences between precursors in the context of solid-state synthesis. To quantify precursor similarity, we built a substitution model to calculate the viability of substituting one precursor with another while retaining the target. From a hierarchical clustering of the precursors, we demonstrate that the “chemical similarity” of precursors can be extracted from text data. Quantifying the similarity of precursors helps provide a foundation for suggesting candidate reactants in a predictive synthesis model.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2020

Iterative X-ray spectroscopic ptychography

Spectroscopic ptychography is a powerful technique to determine the chemical composition of a sample with high spatial resolution. In spectro-ptychography, a sample is rastered through a focused X-ray beam with varying photon energy so that a series of phaseless diffraction data are recorded. Each chemical component in the material under investigation has a characteristic absorption and phase contrast as a function of photon energy. Using a dictionary formed by the set of contrast functions of each energy for each chemical component, it is possible to obtain the chemical composition of the material from high-resolution multi-spectral images. This paper presents SPA (spectroscopic ptychography with alternating direction method of multipliers), a novel algorithm to iteratively solve the spectroscopic blind ptychography problem. First, a nonlinear spectro-ptychography model based on Poisson maximum likelihood is designed, and then the proposed method is constructed on the basis of fast iterative splitting operators. SPA can be used to retrieve spectral contrast when considering either a known or an incomplete (partially known) dictionary of reference spectra. By coupling the redundancy across different spectral measurements, the proposed algorithm can achieve higher reconstruction quality when compared with standard state-of-the-art two-step methods. It is demonstrated how SPA can recover accurate chemical maps from Poisson-noised measurements, and its enhanced robustness when reconstructing reduced-redundancy ptychography data using large scanning step sizes is shown.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗