Multiphase combustion for energy conversion and materials synthesis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Combustion has long been central to energy conversion, but its role is rapidly evolving to meet the demands of a sustainable energy future. This talk explores how combustion processes can be leveraged both for advanced materials synthesis and for deepening our understanding of complex reactive systems. In the first part, I will introduce flame-assisted spray pyrolysis as a scalable and rapid approach for producing lithium-ion battery cathode materials, demonstrating how flame-based synthesis enables control over particle morphology and enhances electrochemical performance. In the second part, I will shift focus to the combustion of energetic materials, highlighting inverse modeling approaches that extract chemical kinetics and transport properties from thermal and pressure data. These methods offer new pathways to decode the coupling between reaction and transport phenomena, ultimately enabling the rational design of energetic systems with tailored thermal and gas-generation behaviors.
About the speaker
Dr. Sili Deng is the Class of 1954 Career Development Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her doctoral degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, co-advised by Profs. Chung K. Law and Michael E. Mueller. After her postdoctoral training with Prof. Xiaolin Zheng at Stanford University, she joined MIT as an Assistant Professor in 2019. Her research focuses on energy conversion and storage, specifically, the fundamental understanding of combustion and emissions, physics-informed data-driven modeling of reacting flows, carbon-neutral energetic materials, and flame synthesis of materials for catalysis and energy storage. Prof. Deng has received many awards including the Bernard Lewis Fellowship from the Combustion Institute in 2016, the NSF CAREER Award in 2022, the Irvin Glassman Young Investigator Award in 2024, and the US Early Career Combustion Investigator Award in 2025.
