at American East Coast
in Middle Europe

Energy Storage Team in the ORNL Materials Processing Group

David Wood 1David is a staff scientist researching lithium ion battery and electrochemical supercapacitor materials and processing methods.  He has spent his entire 14-year post-baccalaureate career researching polymer electrolyte fuel cells.  His latest work (2003-2009) at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cabot Corporation has focused on elucidation of key chemical degradation mechanisms, development of accelerated testing methods, and component development of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) and direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs).

From 2000-2002, David was the North American key account and technical service manager for the SGL Carbon Group fuel cell team leading sales and development of molded polymer-composite bipolar plates and fully processed gas diffusion layer (GDL) materials.  While at SGL Carbon, he held an executive member seat on the U.S. Fuel Cell Council.  From 1997-2000, he was an R&D project engineer on the General Motors fuel cell team.  In that position, he was responsible for all aspects of internal and external GDL R&D and production, PEMFC stack materials engineering and development, test engineering, novel characterization methods, and experiment design.

David received his Ph.D. in chemical  engineering from the University of New Mexico in 2007, his M.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1998, and his B.S. in chemical engineering from North Carolina State University in 1994.  He has authored/co-authored a book chapter, three patents, 18 scientific publications, and 37 conference presentations covering various fuel cell research topics.

David won the inaugural Best Poster Award Contest at the 2004 Fuel Cell Seminar and received honorable mention for the Dr. Bernard S. Baker Student Award for Fuel Cell Research in 2005.  He was part of two Los Alamos National Laboratory research teams that won the DOE Hydrogen Program R&D Award for outstanding achievement in 2005 and 2009.  He was also part of the Cabot Corporation DMFC team, which won the Samuel W. Bodman Award for Excellence in 2008.

kalnaus 002Sergiy Kalnaus holds a Bachelor’s Diploma with Honors and MS degree from Kharkov Polytechnic University (Ukraine), and Ph.D. degree from University of Nevada, Reno (USA) in Mechanical Engineering.  His areas of expertise include fatigue and fracture of materials, fatigue cracking behavior, crystal plasticity, and constitutive relations for inelastic deformation. 

Previous research experience of Dr. Kalnaus includes:

·         Extensive experimental study on fatigue behavior of metallic materials, mainly austenitic stainless steels.  Experiments involving multiaxial fatigue with different fracture modes as well as crack growth experiments. 

·         Development of multiaxial fatigue models based on the experimental results. 

·         Experimental study and modeling of cyclic plasticity properties of stainless steels. 

·         Crack growth rate modeling with constant and variable loading conditions. 

·         Environmentally assisted cracking and corrosion fatigue of metallic materials

·         Experimental investigation of fatigue properties of nano-composite materials. 

 

The overall goal of the current project within MSTD is to connect experimentally and theoretically the knowledge and techniques of fatigue and fracture mechanics with the cyclic degradation processes occurring in electrode materials of Li-ion batteries for further prediction of fatigue properties and development of new technologies for improvement of cyclic performance of electrode materials.

Li 001Jianlin Li received his Ph.D from the University of Florida in Materials Science and Engineering in 2009. He holds a M.S. in Material Science and two B.S. in Materials Chemistry and Electronic Informational Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China.

His research has been focused on development and optimization of novel materials for mixed conducting membrane reactors and their application in hydrogen production and separation through partial oxidation of methane, water gas shift reaction, steam reforming of methane, and carbon dioxide reforming of methane.

His current work within MSTD focuses on the effect of material processing on lithium ion battery performance.

Rhodes 001Kevin Rhodes earned his bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering with dual minors in Chemistry and Materials Science in 2006 and his master’s degree in Polymer Engineering in 2008 both from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Materials Science and Engineering department at the University of Tennessee and an adjunct faculty member of the Chemistry department at Pellissippi State Community College. For his dissertation research he is studying the acoustic emissions from lithium ion battery active materials and how this can be combined with other techniques to provide novel characterization techniques and guide the development on improved materials. Kevin is an active student member of the Electrochemical Society for which he as served as a speaker, sessions chair, and manuscript reviewer. He has also taught lab sections for university courses including Introduction to Materials Science, General Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry.

Collaborators

This group works with many internal and external collaborators together. Some are named under "research" topics. Others might be found on the ORNL Energy Storage Webpage. For more information, email us.