Venkat Viswanathan
Associate Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
Faculty Fellow, Scott Institute for Energy Innovation
Carnegie Mellon University

Battery electric vehicles, powered by renewable energy sources offer a promising path to sustainable mobility. I will compare and contrast the performance metrics needed of batteries for electric land and air vehicles and assess the energy-efficiency of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft compared to ground vehicles.[1] Identifying the challenging but achievable battery performance requirements for eVTOL, I will discuss two approaches to achieve the required improvements: (i) increasing the battery specific energy using lithium metal anodes enabled through a new density-driven dendrite suppression mechanism and realized with a soft polymer-ceramic composite separator,[2] (ii) utilizing more of the battery’s available energy through improved performance and degradation predictions using scientific machine learning.[3] Following this, I will discuss the requirements for all-electric single and twin-aisle aircraft and outline battery chemistry innovations that offer a pathway to achieving these requirements.[4] I will discuss two key tools to accelerate the innovation timeline for these battery chemistries: (i) in-situ and operando characterization[5] (ii) robotic and autonomous experimentation to optimize battery materials.[6]

About the Speaker...
Venkat Viswanathan is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He leads an interdisciplinary group of ~30 researchers working on technologies that can accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation and aviation. He is a recipient of numerous awards including the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35, Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry and National Science Foundation CAREER award.