An international team of researchers just published in Advanced Energy Materials the widest study on what happens during battery failure, focusing on the different parts of a battery at the same time. The role of the ESRF was crucial for its success.
We have all experienced it: you have charged your mobile phone and after a short period using it, the battery goes down unusually quickly. Consumer electronics seem to lose power at uneven rates and this is due to the heterogeneity in batteries. When the phone is charging, the top layer charges first and the bottom layer charges later. The mobile phone may indicate it’s complete when the top surface level is finished charging, but the bottom will be undercharged. If you use the bottom layer as your fingerprint, the top layer will be overcharged and will have safety problems.
The truth is, batteries are composed of many different parts that behave differently. Solid polymer helps hold particles together, carbon additives provide electrical connection, and then there are the active battery particles storing and releasing the energy.
An international team of scientists from ESRF, SLAC, Virginia Tech and Purdue University wanted to understand and quantitatively define what leads to the failure of lithium-ion batteries. Until then, studies had either zoomed in on individual areas or particles in the cathode during failure or zoomed out to look at cell level behavior without offering sufficient microscopic details. Now this study provides the first global view with unprecedented amount of microscopic structural details to complement the existing studies in the battery literature.