Northeastern Engineer Building a Battery That Won't Catch Fire Wins a National Chemistry Award

A Northeastern University engineer whose lab is developing solid-state batteries designed not to catch fire has been selected for a national research award, Northeastern Global News reported Thursday.

Hongli "Julie" Zhu, an associate professor in Northeastern's College of Engineering, was chosen in September to receive the 2027 Research Excellence Award in Electrochemical Energy Storage from the American Chemical Society's Energy and Fuel Division, according to the university. The ACS, based in Washington, D.C., has more than 260,000 members and affiliates worldwide; its Energy and Fuels Division describes itself as a community of more than 2,250 scientists and engineers. The award, sponsored by CAPCHEM Technology USA, honors mid-career scientists for significant, original contributions to electrochemical energy storage, along with leadership in the field and service to the ACS division, according to Northeastern's College of Engineering. It comes with a dedicated award symposium at an ACS national meeting, an honorarium and a plaque.

"It's really a big deal," said Yingzi Lin, a distinguished professor and chair of Northeastern's mechanical and industrial engineering department. "The ACS is a big society, it's hard to get recognized, so this honors her reputation in the field." Zhu's reaction: "I'm very happy about it. I love my job, I really love research."

The problem her lab is working on is a familiar one. Most lithium-ion batteries, in phones, laptops and electric cars, move lithium ions between two electrodes through a liquid chemical electrolyte. When a flaw lets the anode touch the cathode, the resulting short circuit can superheat that liquid and start a chain reaction called thermal runaway, which is hard to stop because burning batteries produce their own oxygen, according to the National Fire Protection Association, as cited by Northeastern. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission counted at least 25,000 incidents of lithium-ion battery fire or overheating between 2020 and 2025, the university reported. That fire risk is why airlines bar most devices with such batteries from checked luggage.

"Batteries are important to everything we do," Zhu said. "It's portable energy." When she hears about an e-bike or car fire, she said, she knows it was likely a failed battery, and it pushes her to work harder.

Her alternative replaces the liquid with a solid electrolyte: a specially formulated ceramic using sulfide ions, through whose crystalline structure lithium ions move between anode and cathode. Because the core is solid, there is little chance of a fire from a short circuit, she said. Zhu compared the ion in a conventional battery to "a ball floating in water," while in her ceramic it moves like a "basket ball, bouncing along the crystalline structure." Northeastern described the cells as gray cylinders that look something like a biscuit from a tube of dough, if it were as hard as concrete. "These are the future," she said.

The work happens in a small lab on Northeastern's Boston campus, where researchers grind and mix the electrolyte, heat-treat it into discs, and stack and compress the layers with electrodes into short cylinders. Much of the handling is done inside sealed acrylic glove boxes.

Zhu's search for a better battery spans more than a decade, since she opened her lab, Lin said, attracting students from across the U.S. and abroad. Her research has been cited more than 26,000 times on Google Scholar, according to Northeastern, and ACS Energy Letters featured her this year in its "Women Scientists at the Forefront of Energy Research" series.

The College of Engineering describes her group's research as spanning sulfide-based all-solid-state batteries, flow batteries, and battery systems for fast charging and high energy density. The group pairs materials and interface engineering with real-time neutron imaging to watch lithium move inside working batteries, and it also develops biomass-derived materials for electronics, energy and bioengineering.

Sulfide electrolytes are attractive because of high ionic conductivity and compatibility with lithium metal, the college said, but their development has been slowed by chemical, electrochemical and mechanical instabilities at the interfaces between layers. "By directly observing lithium evolution and interfacial dynamics, we can identify failure pathways and establish design principles that move sulfide all-solid-state batteries closer to reliable implementation," Zhu said in the college's account of the ACS Energy Letters feature. Her work has been supported by federal agencies including the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, the college said.

She is not alone in the field. Many companies and scientists are working on similar solid-state designs, and the obstacles so far have been design and production cost, Northeastern reported, citing the industrial technology publication Construction Physics. The university's article did not give a timeline for commercial use of Zhu's cells or describe performance figures such as energy density or cycle life.

Not reported: energy density, cost and any commercial partner for Zhu's cells.