Materials Chemistry

Materials chemistry serves as a foundational science for humanity’s manufacture of goods and production of energy. Presently, we find ourselves in a period of transition towards sustainable solutions for meeting society’s increasing energy needs. Notably, the broad adoption of renewable — and temporally volatile — sources of electricity drive an unprecedented demand for large scale energy storage and all around improvements in energy conversion efficiency for which there remain substantive limitations in the component materials that largely define their overall performance. By developing an atomistic understanding of how materials are made, described, and designed, you will be equipped with the fundamental thinking tools needed to evaluate and develop the next generation of high performance materials for use in batteries, solar cells, gas storage/separation, and solid state lighting and ultimately provide you with a set of hard skills in materials design to improve readiness in the materials job market as well as fundamental research. market and research opportunities.

Course objectives

The primary objectives of this course focus on developing a set of basic thinking tools for the evaluation and design of materials. While the context of this course focuses on their applications to energy production and storage, you will the core skills developed in the course widely applicable to materials broadly defined.

Specifically you will learn the symmetry and structure of crystals; chemical stability and bonding in periodic systems; X-ray scattering and atomic structure determination; electronic structure and band theory; phase transformation and the use of phase diagrams and Pourbaix diagrams; basic synthetic methods; and their applications to charge transport, photophysics, porous materials, and bulk magnetization.

Prerequisite knowledge

This course requires a solid grasp of fundamental organic and inorganic chemistry including participation of d-orbitals in bonding, basic reaction mechanisms, crystal field theory, electron counting, coordination chemistry and redox reactions.

Why focus on crystals when most materials are not crystals?

Crystals are periodic structures with very precisely defined atomic positions that maintain coherence over very long length scales. Much of our knowledge of amorphous polymers, glasses, aperiodic lattices, and composite materials comes from the study of phase pure crystals from which properties of more complex materials may be inferred. Ultimately this originates from the inherent simplicity of crystals where by only specifying a few atoms, a structure containing millions upon millions of atoms can be modeled and simulated to a very high levels of accuracy and precision. While non-crystalline materials are more complex (and often more practical), in many ways this complexity is intransigent such than much our our analyses of non-crystalline forms is an abstracted or simplified form of those implemented in crystalline analogues.