About

Nitin Padture is the Otis E. Randall University Professor of Engineering at Brown University and serves as the Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE). His research interests include renewable energy and energy efficiency, with a focus on halide perovskite solar cells and modules. He is also engaged in the tailoring of high-temperature advanced structural ceramics, composites, and coatings for high-efficiency, fuel-flexible gas-turbine engines used in electricity generation and aircraft propulsion. Padture has received recognition for his contributions to engineering, including the Humboldt Research Award, and is ranked among the top two percent of scientists worldwide in his field.

Research topics

• Composite material
• Chemical engineering
• Materials science
• Physical chemistry
• Crystallography
• Chemistry
• Mineralogy
• Metallurgy
• Inorganic chemistry
• Geology
• Optoelectronics
• Nanotechnology

Selected publications

• Trade-offs at the interface

  Nature Energy · 2025-01-10 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cracking in polymer substrates for flexible electronic devices and its mitigation

  npj Flexible Electronics · 2025-08-22 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Mechanical reliability plays a critical role in determining the durability of flexible electronic devices because of the significant mechanical stresses they experience during manufacturing and operation. Many such devices are built on sheets comprising stiff transparent-conducting oxide (TCO) electrode films on compliant polymer substrates, and it is generally assumed that the high-toughness polymer substrates do not crack. Contrary to this assumption, here we show extensive cracking in the polymer substrates during bending of a variety of TCO/polymer sheets, and a device example — flexible perovskite solar cells. Such substrate cracking, which compromises the overall mechanical integrity of the entire device, is driven by the amplified stress-intensity factor caused by the elastic mismatch at the film/substrate interface. To mitigate this substrate cracking, an interlayer-engineering approach is designed and experimentally demonstrated. This approach is potentially applicable to myriad flexible electronic devices, with stiff films on compliant substrates, for improving their durability and reliability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Low Dosage <i>In-situ</i> and <i>Ex-situ</i> S/TEM Characterization of Hybrid Organic-Inorganic MAPbI3

  Microscopy and Microanalysis · 2025-07-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskites (HPs) show great promise for a variety of applications, including low-cost high efficiency solar-cells.Recent improvements in the HP solar cells performance focused on processing conditions optimization at the macroscopic length-scale [1], while structural characterization at the nanometer length-scale remains under-explored.Their high electron beam sensitivity translates to various challenges when applying common S/TEM characterization techniques, that are otherwise ideal for addressing structure-property relations.To date, S/TEM based work on HPs that employed very low electron dosages included adjustment of the samples to increase their electron beam stability, such as doping, coating or use of evaporated samples [2, 3], which are not representative of the solution-based processing techniques conventionally used for HPs.In this work we employ complementary low dosage S/TEM routes to characterize undoped solution based MAPbI 3 (without coating).Low dosage S/TEM imaging, including drift-corrected and dosage-calibrated imaging (see figure 1), was used to define the onset of degradation, determine where it initiates, and account for sources of variability in those aspects.Low dosage diffraction based techniques were used to map the microstructure over larger regions while avoiding imaging artifacts that are present in fast Fourier transforms (FFTs).Finally, environmental TEM was used to account for the effect of exposure to air (see figure 2) [4].

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Flaw-size-dependent mechanical interlayer coupling and edge-reconstruction embrittlement in van der Waals materials

  Nature Materials · 2025-03-28 · 20 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Direct in situ Observation of Interlayer Shear-Based Pull-Out as Crack-Bridging Mechanisms in Nanocomposites of Silicon Nitride and Boron Nitride Nanoplatelets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Cracking in polymer substrates for flexible devices and its mitigation

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-14 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Mechanical reliability plays an outsized role in determining the durability of flexible electronic devices because of the significant mechanical stresses they can experience during manufacturing and operation. These devices are typically built on sheets comprising stiff thin-film electrodes on compliant polymer substrates, and it is generally assumed that the high-toughness substrates do not crack easily. Contrary to this widespread assumption, here we reveal severe, pervasive, and extensive cracking in the polymer substrates during bending of electrode/substrate sheets, which compromises the overall mechanical integrity of the entire device. The substrate-cracking phenomenon appears to be general, and it is driven by the amplified stress intensity factor caused by the elastic mismatch at the film/substrate interface. To mitigate this substrate cracking, an interlayer-engineering approach is designed and experimentally demonstrated. This approach is generic, and it is potentially applicable to myriad flexible electronic devices that utilize stiff films on compliant substrates, for improving their durability and reliability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mitigating cracking of polymer substrates for flexible devices including perovskite solar cells

  Proceedings of the International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics · 2025-02-17

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Connecting Mechanical Properties, Durability, and Reliability of High-Performance Perovskite Solar Photovoltaics

  Proceedings of the International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics · 2025-02-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Effects of seasalt and sulfate additions on the melting and crystallization behavior of CMAS glass

  International Journal of Applied Ceramic Technology · 2025-08-05 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Particulate silicates (sand, dust, ash) present in the environment, which are ingested by aircraft gas‐turbine engines (GTEs), are known to melt and deposit as calcia‒mangesia‒aluminosilicate (CMAS) glass on GTE hot‐section hardware. These deposits degrade the protective ceramic thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) and environmental barrier coatings (EBCs) in the hot‐section. Other particulates present in the environment, such as seasalt and sulfates, are also ingested by GTEs. Although CMAS‐induced degradation of TBCs and EBCs have been studied, the effects of these other corrodents on the CMAS deposits, and how CMAS + corrodent mixtures degrade TBCs and EBCs remain unclear. This work examines systematically the effect of the addition of corrodents (CaSO 4 , seasalt, or Na 2 SO 4 ) to the CMAS on its melting and crystallization behavior. Various amounts of the corrodents were mixed separately with CMAS glass, and heat treated at various temperatures in air. Mass loss and changes to the chemical compositions were also evaluated. Phase evolution was studied experimentally, and it was compared to prospective equilibrium phases computed using the calculation of phase diagrams (CALPHAD) method. It is found that CaSO 4 alters the CMAS most significantly, and it may pose the greatest threat for exacerbating deposit‐induced degradation of TBCs and EBCs in GTEs.

  PublisherDOI

• Bilayer Electron Transport Layers for High‐Performance Rigid and Flexible Perovskite Solar Cells

  Solar RRL · 2025-03-18 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  While great progress is being made in achieving high power conversion efficiency (PCE), durability, and reliability in rigid and flexible n–i–p perovskite solar cells (PSCs), there is still room for improvement. Among myriad ways this can be achieved, one way is to improve the processing and quality of electron transport layers (ETLs) used in PSCs. To that end, here we explore the use of SnO 2 /TiO 2 bilayer ETLs in both rigid and flexible PSCs. In the case of rigid PSCs, chemical bath deposition (CBD) is used where the bilayer architecture affords the CBD of high‐quality ETL, which results in PSCs with up to 25.13% PCE and operational stability T 80 (80% of initial PCE retained) of 2220 h under 1‐sun continuous illumination with maximum power‐point tracking. In the case of flexible PSCs, once again, the bilayer architecture allows us to fabricate high‐quality ETL using spin coating, which results in PSCs with up to 22.54% PCE and excellent mechanical durability, withstanding 20 000 bending cycles with ≈92% of the initial PCE retained. Mechanisms underlying the enhanced performance and stability/durability of rigid and flexible PSCs that use SnO 2 /TiO 2 bilayer ETLs are elucidated. This approach could be extended to other ETL systems for PSCs for further improvements in PCE, durability, and reliability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Emergent Opto-Mechanical and Electro-Mechanical Coupled Behavior of Halide Perovskites

  NSF · $480k · 2021–2025

• Sensors: Engineered Nanowires and Arrays as Advanced Chemical Nanosensors

  NSF · $375k · 2005–2008

• RII Track-2 FEC: Low-Cost, Efficient Next-Generation Solar Cells for the Coming Clean Energy Revolution

  NSF · $4.0M · 2015–2020

• Ceramics Science of New Solid-State Solar Cells

  NSF · $550k · 2013–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Yuanyuan Zhou

  Southwest Jiaotong University

  356 shared

• Min Chen

  Arizona State University

  146 shared

• A. L. Vasiliev

  122 shared

• Zhenghong Dai

  Providence College

  112 shared

• Shuping Pang

  Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology

  109 shared

• Hector F. Garcés

  Providence College

  102 shared

• Yingxia Zong

  Qingdao University of Science and Technology

  93 shared

• J. Bartolomé

  Instituto de Nanociencia y Materiales de Aragón

  81 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Materials Science and Engineering

  Lehigh University

  1991

Awards & honors

• Humboldt Research Award (2025)