Abstract: Liquid-phase and wet-processing techniques offer tremendous opportunities for low-cost manufacturing. Today, these approaches have facilitated the massive upscaling of lithium- ion battery technology and promise to play a future role in a wide variety of electronic, photonic, and electrochemical systems. Materials and devices made from these approaches often exhibit hierarchical structures and have complex interfaces that are key to their performance.

In this talk, I will describe the importance of understanding structure-performance relationships to achieve the full potential of solution processed systems. To characterize structure and structural dynamics in these complex, multiscale materials, we leverage a wide variety of techniques including electron microscopy; X-ray imaging, diffraction, and scattering; neutron scattering and imaging; and muon spectroscopy. Combining information from characterization with simulation and experiment, we use our findings to understand the origins of performance limitations and develop design guidelines to systematically improve material and devices.

Bio: Vanessa Wood is a professor at ETH Zürich and currently holds the chair in the Materials and Device Engineering Group  in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. She received her PhD in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.