Abstract: Technology progressions in wearable devices, portable electronics and electric vehicles have motivated a shift in Lithium-ion batteries to accommodate safer, longer-life, higher-power-and-energy materials with more efficient form factors and packaging.  One emerging trend to address this technology shift is the use of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques to rapidly fabricate 3D batteries with customized geometries on a micron to millimeter scale, changing the way engineers conceptualize energy storage devices today.  3D battery architectures can enhance ion transport for existing battery materials, thereby increasing potential energy and power gains over conventional planar stacks of battery electrodes.  This talk will provide background and context for 3D batteries, discuss future applications, and highlight my group’s recent work in computational modeling and AM for 3D batteries.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Corie L. Cobb is a Tenure-Track Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and joined the University of Washington (UW) in 2017 through a Washington Research Foundation Professorship in Clean Energy.  At the UW, Dr. Cobb is also a faculty member of the Clean Energy Institute and the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute.  She came to the UW from Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Inc. where she was a Senior Member of Research Staff leading research projects on advanced manufacturing technologies for solar cells and batteries. Dr. Cobb’s research lies at the intersection of additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and computational design for printing and patterning of multi-functional materials. Her research has been funded by grants from DOE, ARPA-E, DARPA and industrial partners. Prior to PARC, Dr. Cobb was a mechanical engineer at Applied Materials and held internship positions at Hewlett-Packard, Bell Labs, Google and Toshiba.

Dr. Cobb is a recent recipient of a 2019 DARPA Young Faculty Award and a 2019 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.  Dr. Cobb received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. She holds a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a bachelor’s degree in Product Design from Stanford University.