Adaptive energy materials are designed to sense, respond, and adapt to their surroundings, enabling energy and infrastructure systems that are as dynamic and resilient as nature. These innovations promise a new generation of materials that intelligently manage charge, ion, heat, and mass transport in response to environmental change. Researchers in this focus group develop materials and systems that adapt under real-world operating conditions, integrating experiments, simulations, and data-driven modeling to uncover fundamental design principles and guide practical applications.
Our goals are to:
- Uncover how microstructures and interfaces evolve under stress, fields, or temperature.
- Understand how these changes affect charge, ion, mass, and heat transport.
- Establish design principles for dynamic, self-regulated, and reconfigurable materials.
Key material systems include:
Charge & Ion Transport Materials
- Develop materials that dynamically regulate electrical and ionic conductivity.
- Engineer self-regulating electrode–electrolyte interfaces that adapt to local flux, stress, and potential.
- Create viscoelastic and piezoelectric composites to improve charge transport and durability.
- Use AI-driven simulations for high-throughput design and predictive modeling.
Heat & Mass Transport Materials
- Design materials that restructure internally in response to environmental cues.
- Control thermal conduction, diffusion, and adsorption through adaptive architectures.
- Investigate how mechanical, thermal, and sorption behaviors interact under non-equilibrium conditions.
- Employ physics-informed machine learning and large language models to accelerate materials discovery.