The ever-escalating need for efficient, affordable and environmentally benign energy technologies drives research on materials for fuel cells, supercapacitors, batteries,electrolysers, and other electrochemical systems. In this realm, physical-mathematical theory and computation provide increasingly powerful tools to unravel how multifunctional electrochemical materials come to life during self-organization, how they live and operate, e.g., by breathing oxygen in and water vapour out of complex catalyst layers or by shuttling ions across electrolytes, and how they age and fail during normal duty cycles or under extreme conditions. After presenting a sweeping perspective of the field, the lecture will focus on two frontier-type topics: (1) the complex interplay of interfacial charging, transport and electrochemical reaction in nanoporous media and (2) the statistical physics-based modeling of degradation and aging in porous composite electrodes.
