Materials set what a cell could store. Mechanics decides how long it survives storing it.

The Clean Energy and Water Laboratory studies how solids deform while they react — the coupling that limits solid-state batteries and separation membranes — at RIT's Kate Gleason College of Engineering.

Our research Join the lab

A battery is a structure that changes shape while it works. Lithium plates into a ceramic that cannot accommodate it, cathode particles swell and crack away from their conductive network, and a separator that was mechanically sound at assembly is fractured after fifty cycles.

That coupling — reactive mechanics, the behavior of solids that deform while they react — is what we study, and it is the barrier standing between solid-state batteries and the manufacturing scale-up the field is now attempting. The same physics governs ion transport through a membrane under load, so our program spans two application domains that share a mechanism: electrochemical energy storage, and separation and recovery of critical materials.

Both are pursued the same way — first-principles and machine-learned simulation to establish mechanism, continuum modeling to reach device scale, and in-house electrochemistry to test the prediction.

Research thrusts

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  Solid-state batteries

  Dendrite growth through the solid electrolyte, composite-cathode degradation, anode-free architectures, and the granular creep that governs how electrolytes densify.

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  Water & critical materials

  Capacitive deionization for desalination and heavy-metal removal, lithium recovery from brine, and ion transport through membranes under confinement.

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  Electro-chemo-mechanics

  One framework beneath both: DFT, molecular dynamics, phase field, and finite element modeling coupled with AI-accelerated multiscale methods.

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