Breaking Up Isn’t So Hard to Do

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

A great deal of the research on lithium batteries goes into figuring out how to keep them together for the greatest number of charge-discharge cycles.   Unfortunately, the active compounds in these batteries that give the greatest energy storage capacity or power output, also tend to be those compounds that come unglued under stress. Taking high-resolution 3D movies with X-ray tomography (somewhat like the CAT scans used on human subjects), researchers at the Swiss Light Source, a mecca for seeing the unseeable, have witnessed the expansion and contraction of the internal structure of lithium-ion batteries, while the batteries are operating. Stanford University’s Dr. Cui has explained that the expansion and contraction of batteries leads to their eventual failure, but until now, there has been no real-time observation of these internal reactions.  Martin Ebner, a Ph.D. candidate at the Laboratory for Nanoelectronics in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) and Professor Vanessa Wood, head of the …