October 1
@
12:00 PM
–
1:00 PM
NEEP Seminar Series
Thursdays
12:00 – 1:00 PM
106 Engineering Research Building
Building Robust Energy Materials: Managing Damage Carriers in Open-System Environments
Efficient and robust energy infrastructures for decarbonization require materials that can mediate nuclear, electrochemical, or electrical reactions over long periods, often while converting or releasing large amounts of energy, as in nuclear reactor walls and battery electrodes. Because these reactions occur in open systems that exchange atoms, neutrons, or electrons, they can generate internal stresses on the order of gigapascals, leading to material degradation and creating challenges across the energy life cycle.
In this seminar, I will present my approach to designing damage-tolerant energy materials under these open-system conditions. The central idea is to redistribute “damage carriers”—the atomic species exchanged during operation—into regions where they are less harmful or even beneficial. I will highlight one example in which helium-induced damage in fusion reactor materials is proactively redirected into more benign forms, along with an approach for accelerating materials screening using a foundation model for chemistry.
Together, these efforts support a broader vision: empowering the systems engineering of energy materials by reframing their design challenges through a unified understanding of mechanical behavior in open systems, grounded in the fundamentals and informatics of material imperfections.
So Yeon Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Materials Science and Engineering from Seoul National University in South Korea, earned her Sc.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT, and completed postdoctoral research in Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. Her research focuses on designing damage-tolerant materials for robust energy systems. She combines modeling, data-driven methods, and experiments to understand and control how material imperfections evolve, with the goal of mitigating degradation and failure.
Please contact office@neep.wisc.edu for assistance with remote participation.