White, colleagues win SEM Hetényi Award

Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Prof. Scott R. White and his colleagues have won the Society for Experimental Mechanics’ 2016 M. Hetényi Award for research involving composite battery electrodes.

Co-authors on the winning paper, “In Situ Measurements of Strains in Composite Battery Electrodes during Electromechanical Cycling,” were White and Nancy R. Sottos, materials science professor at Illinois and an AE faculty affiliate, along with E.M.C. Jones, a PhD candidate in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and M.N. Silberstein, formerly a Beckman Fellow of the Beckman Institute. The paper was published in the July 2014 edition of the journal, Experimental Mechanics.

Repeated charge and discharge cycles stress lithium-ion battery electrodes, resulting in reduced performance and lifetime. The researchers digitally captured measurements of the strain inside the batteries to enable future studies of the relationship between electrode mechanics and battery performance.

The work is part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s $45 million Center for Electrochemical Energy Science, an Energy Frontier Research Center, established in 2009 as a partnership between Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Northwestern University. 

White has been involved with the battery research for the past six years.

The Hetényi Award was established in 1967 for the best research paper published in Experimental Mechanics. The award was named in honor of Dr. Miklos Hetényi, a founder of SEM.