Jeffrey Smith and Braeden Gilchrist will be accompanying Dr. Calvin Li as part of a faculty-student research team at the National Renewable Energy Lab. They have been chosen to participate in state-of-the-art research with the U.S. Department of Energy in Golden, Colorado. They will be working with some of the greatest scientists in the world along with students from colleges from across the U.S. such as Stanford, MIT, and Georgia Tech. They will be furthering the NREL's mission find clean and renewable energy solutions to our nations' and the worlds' energy needs. They will be performing research on the thermal properties of hybrid car batteries, which could increase the performance of the batteries and therefore the performance of hybrid cars.

The Toledo team will be looking at different materials used to bond the layers of a battery, we will examine resulting thermal stresses which can ultimately lead to mechanical failures. In this project, we will use the classical molecular dynamics code LAMMPS to perform atomistic computations of thermal transport and mechanical behavior of the interface between substrates used in power electronics applications - such as silicon/aluminum and silicon/copper, with novel bonding materials (such as sintered silver) in between the substrates. While the initial focus is on understanding fundamental thermomechanical phenomena, the ultimate goal is to use these insights/results for macroscale package models. We will also seek experimental validation of modeling results. The overall goal of this project is to help in the design of high thermal performance and reliable packaging configurations.