Experiments at SLAC and Berkeley Lab uproot long-held assumptions and will inform future battery design.
Over the past three decades, lithium-ion batteries, rechargeable batteries that move lithium ions back and forth to charge and discharge, have enabled smaller devices that juice up faster and last longer.
Now, X-ray experiments at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have revealed that the pathways lithium ions take through a common battery material are more complex than previously thought. The results correct more than two decades worth of assumptions about the material and will help improve battery design, potentially leading to a new generation of lithium-ion batteries.
An international team of researchers, led by William Chueh, a faculty scientist at SLAC’s Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Sciences and a Stanford materials science professor, published these findings today in Nature Materials.
“Before, it was kind of like a black box,” said Martin Bazant, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another leader of the study. “You could see that the material worked pretty well and certain additives seemed to help, but you couldn’t tell exactly where the lithium ions go in every step of the process. You could only try to develop a theory and work backwards from measurements. With new instruments and measurement techniques, we’re starting to have a more rigorous scientific understanding of how these things actually work.”
>Read more on the SLAC website
Image: When lithium ions flow into the battery’s solid electrode – illustrated here in hexagonal slices – the lithium can rearrange itself, causing the ions to clump together into hot spots that end up shortening the battery lifetime.
Credit: Stanford University/3Dgraphic