New Cathode Design Solves Major Barrier to Better Lithium-Ion Batteries By U.S. Department of Energy Published 1 day ago

RV_ · September 10, 2022

Hot info: We were just talking about needing results from ongoing research to increase the range and stability of EV batteries.

Here is a major step.

"Boundary-free structure for electrode particles eliminates reactions that diminish battery life.

Argonne researchers have made another breakthrough with the NMC cathode. The team’s new structure for the cathode’s micro-sized particles could lead to longer-lasting and safer batteries able to operate at very high voltage and power vehicles for longer driving ranges.

“We now have guidelines that battery manufacturers can use to prepare cathode material that is boundary-free and works at high voltage.” — Khalil Amine, Argonne Distinguished Fellow

Importantly, the team developed a method for producing boundary-free single crystals. Testing of small cells with such single-crystal cathodes at very high voltage showed a 25% increase in energy storage per unit volume, with almost no loss of performance over 100 cycles of testing. By contrast, over the same cycle life, the capacity declined by 60% to 88% in NMC cathodes composed of single crystals with many internal boundaries or with coated polycrystals.

Eliminating the boundaries prevents oxygen release and thereby improves the cathode safety and stability with cycling. Oxygen release measurements at APS and the Advanced Light Source at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory supported this finding.

“We now have guidelines that battery manufacturers can use to prepare cathode material that is boundary free and works at high voltage,” said Khalil Amine, an Argonne Distinguished Fellow. “And the guidelines should apply to other cathode materials besides NMC.”

A paper on this research appeared in Nature Energy.

The research was supported by the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office.

Comments have been made that we need real advances and labs working on this. Many of the opinion that these advances are years off. This one is real today, and we will see how fast it gets implemented.

Source:

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/09/new-cathode-design-solves-major-barrier-to-better-lithium-ion-batteries/

Below are the labs responsible. Their websites and contact data are there in case you see something they missed. I am sure they would love to hear from you.

About Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials

The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities/User-Facilities-at-a-Glance.

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Article and featured image by Argonne National Laboratory.

Source with even more info and links:

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/09/new-cathode-design-solves-major-barrier-to-better-lithium-ion-batteries/