Xiangyang Dong
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Engineering·Early-career
Batteries are usually dead weight: they store energy but carry no load, and they are rigid and bulky. A structural battery made of carbon fiber composites could both store energy and bear mechanical loads.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
structural batteries
carbon fiber reinforced composites
additive manufacturing
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Determine how pressure and viscosity control how liquid soaks into carbon fiber networks during coextrusion 3D printing of structural battery composites, using multi-scale computational fluid dynamics of capillary permeation.
- Functionalize carbon fiber micro-batteries with coatings and test how the coatings affect fiber wetting, mechanical strength and electrochemical performance.
- Relate printing process, microstructure and multifunctional performance in printed structural batteries, using simultaneous mechanical and electrochemical measurements to validate the fluid dynamics models.
- Couple electrochemical powering and bending actuation in 3D printed deformable carbon fiber batteries, making self-powered bending actuators that also serve as the robot's power source.
- Integrate self-powered electrochemical actuators with monostable structures to build untethered soft robots that jump and swim repeatedly, and model their bending using experiments, analytical models and multiphysics simulation.
More about the research
This would cut weight and volume in electric vehicles, and it could also make soft robots self-powered. Both projects use 3D printing with continuous carbon fibers to build battery-integrated structures. They also study how the electrochemical and mechanical behaviors of these structures affect each other.
Why it matters
Load-bearing batteries could make electric vehicles lighter, extending driving range and service life, and could make it easier to spread energy storage throughout a vehicle. Self-powered soft actuators could free soft robots from cables. Such robots could help with search and rescue, exploration on land, undersea and in space, health monitoring and wearable technology.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yue Zhou
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Engineering
Measure how directed energy deposition settings affect both short-range clustering and overall 3D uniformity of micro-scale ceramic particles in printed metal matrix composites, using controlled experiments and advanced characterization.
Steven Kurtz
Drexel University, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and optimize a hybrid additive manufacturing process for carbon-fiber-reinforced polyaryletherketones, combining 3D printing with heat-and-pressure consolidation, using design of experiments.
Ahmad Najafi
Drexel University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Create a 3-M (multiphysics, multiscale, multifunctional) optimization framework that designs a material's constituents and internal architecture at the same time while balancing conflicting functions.
The school
Arizona State University Campus Immersion: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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