Seminar: Nanostructured Materials for Energy Applications

Abstract

The complexity of nanostructured materials and the difficulties in characterizing them has left a major void in our understanding of their microstructure-property relationships. Our research interests focus on the effects of microstructure on materials’ thermal, electronic, and mechanical performance and the methods by which the microstructure can be predicted to improve their properties and reliability. Interfaces and phase transitions play a major role in our research. Developing an improved understanding of interface chemistry, structure, and phase transitions at the atomic or electronic scales requires significant effort in analytical modelling and simulations, such as the development of new stochastic and deterministic methods, as well as the development of portable inter-atomic potentials. In all areas of exploration, our approach is to combine physically-based multiscale models with experimental characterization in a multidisciplinary approach to investigate, understand and model the dynamic mechanisms, controlling the structures and properties of advanced materials from the atomistic to engineering scales.

In this seminar, I will develop three different topics where the material properties have been investigated using new simulation tools. I will provide deep understanding on the microstructure of nanostructured ferritic alloys for advanced fuel cladding, on the thermal conductivity of metallic Uranium for the next generation of nuclear reactors, and on the dielectric breakdown at the metal-oxide interface. I will conclude this talk by giving some new perspectives based on the worked we performed.

About the Speaker

Céline Hin is assistant professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech since August 2011. She did her Ph.D. at the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique at Saclay (France) where she worked on the heterogeneous precipitation in ferritic alloys. Then, she spent one year at UC Berkeley in the nuclear engineering department where she studied the link between the microstructure evolution and the mechanical properties in nanostructured ferritic alloys. In 2007, she joined the Carter’s group at MIT in the department of Materials Science and Engineering, where her research on the Li-ion batteries focused on developing a Grand Canonical Kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm to study the influence of particle orientations in the electrolyte on the cell voltage at atomic scale. Finally, she joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2009, where she worked on thermoelectric materials, trying to improve the figure of merit in PbTe systems using DFT calculations.