Suppressing Those Pesky Dendrites

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Dendrites in the human body are tree-branch-like protuberances that help transmit synapses, defined as tiny transmitters and receivers for chemical messages between the cells.  In this setting they are beneficial and necessary for brain and nervous system development.  In batteries, however, such protuberances send mixed and negative messages that short out connections between the components of the host battery.  This is a serious enough issue that it’s kept lithium-metal batteries from serious development, dendrites growing between dissimilar metals being a malady of such cells, and even causing fires that make lithium batteries a bit fearsome. The blog has reported on efforts by Berkeley Lab researchers to reduce dendrite growth. To enable visualization of these growths, Clare Grey, a professor of chemistry at Cambridge University, teamed up with NYU chemist Alexej Jerschow to develop a way of imaging batteries through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). As Popular Mechanics explained in 2012, “These moss-like crystalline growths, called dendrites, are the bane of battery builders. …