Brown Engineering professor Nitin Padture is the principal investigator (PI) and Yue Qi is the co-PI on a $1.3 million, three-year grant from the Department of Energy (Basic Energy Sciences) for the project, “Fundamental Studies of the Mechanical Behavior of Charged Hetero-Interfaces.”
Mechanical adhesion of hetero-interfaces (interfaces between two solid, or two liquid phases), which are ubiquitous in energy-conversion and storage multi-layer devices, is key to their reliability. However, accumulated charge at those interfaces is typically not considered in the measurement and analyses of mechanical adhesion, representing a critical knowledge gap in interface science.
Padture and Qi hope to address that gap, with the overarching objective of gaining fundamental understanding of the possible effects of accumulated charge modulated by external stimuli (electric field, light) on the adhesion and fracture behavior of a range of hetero-interfaces. The assembled team has all the necessary experimental and computational complementary expertise in interface science to focus on hetero-interfaces between brittle ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ semiconductors relevant to halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs), which provide a model platform for this fundamental study. However, the basic experimental and computational tools that will be developed here will be general, with the potential for extending their application in the future to more complex interfaces and operating conditions relevant to other energy devices such as batteries and fuel cells.
Padture is the founding director and Qi is the deputy director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE), a campus hub for driving technological advances in sustainable energy and preparing the next-generation of leaders in net-zero-carbon energy solutions. ISE convenes researchers from multiple fields of study with the goal of developing solutions in three areas of sustainable energy: renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable fuels and materials.