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Traditionally central to energy conversion, combustion is now being reimagined as a powerful tool for manufacturing and recycling materials critical to energy storage and sustainability. Flame-based spray methods, for example, offer a continuous, rapid, and scalable route to synthesizing and rejuvenating lithium-ion battery (LIB) cathode materials. These processes can reduce production costs, enable efficient material recycling, and improve performance. I will highlight flame-assisted spray pyrolysis as a technique for controlling particle morphology and tailoring electrochemical properties, all within synthesis times orders of magnitude shorter than conventional routes. Yet, alongside these manufacturing advances come critical safety challenges, most notably thermal runaway, a failure mode that can trigger hazardous battery fires. To address these concerns, I will introduce our newly developed Chemical Reaction Neural Network, a data-driven framework that uncovers reaction pathways and infers kinetic parameters directly from data, without requiring prior mechanistic knowledge. This approach offers a new window into the chemistry behind thermal runaway and other reactive phenomena, helping us better understand both the flames that create and the flames that destroy.
Professor Sili Deng is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her doctoral degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. After being a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, she joined MIT as an assistant professor in 2019. Her research focuses on energy conversion and storage, specifically, the fundamental understanding of combustion and emissions, physics-informed data-driven modelling of reacting flows, carbon-neutral energetic materials, and flame synthesis of materials for catalysis and energy storage. Professor Deng has been well recognized by the research community, including receiving the NSF CAREER Award, selected as a Scialog Fellow, and receiving the Hiroshi Tsuji Award by the Combustion Institute.
Clean water and clean air are vital for public health. This project focuses on developing high-efficiency and environmentally sustainable filters for removing harmful air/water pollutants. The team has developed novel architectures and functionalities for the filters to achieve high permeance, high removal efficiency, and excellent reusability.
