Research

 I am interested in studying degradation of nickel-rich cathode materials using statistical mechanics and understanding fundamental physics of energy storage materials. I am also interested in better diagnostics and physics-based processing of diagnostics data. 

D. Zhuang, M. Z. Bazant. Population Effects Driving Active Material Degradation in Intercalation Electrodes

D. Zhuang, M. Z. Bazant. Theory of Layered-oxide Cathode Degradation in Li-ion Batteries by Oxidation-induced Cation Disorder

D. Zhuang et. al. Physics-Informed Design of Hybrid Pulse Power Characterization (HPPC) Tests for Rechargeable Batteries

I am interested in using statistical mechanics methods targeting disorder, defects, and population dynamics to study electrochemical materials, from many particle interactions in lithium-ion batteries to studying degradation using field theories of of disordered phases. I am also interested in driven open systems using nonequilibrium thermodynamics. 

D. Zhuang, M. Z. Bazant. Population Effects Driving Active Material Degradation in Intercalation Electrodes

D. Zhuang, M. Z. Bazant. Theory of Layered-oxide Cathode Degradation in Li-ion Batteries by Oxidation-induced Cation Disorder

I am interested in using building accurate many-body potentials in a hierarchical fashion to understand the effects of higher-order interactions in aqueous systems.

D. Zhuang et al., Many-Body Effects Determine the Local Hydration Structure of Cs+ in Solution

P. Bajaj, D. Zhuang, F. Paesani, Specific Ion Effects on Hydrogen-Bond Rearrangements in the Halide-Dihydrate Complexes

D. Zhuang et al., Hydration Structure of Na+ and K+ Ions in Solution Predicted by Data-Driven Many-Body Potentials