By: Steve Bush December 3, 2021
The Argonne National Laboratory has been studying lithium-ion batteries in great detail, and its scientists have discovered a nano-level degradation mechanism that increases the cause of the decline in the performance of fast-charging lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles.
In use, lithium ions enter and exit the anode, which is usually made of graphite particles. Ions slide between carbon atoms in a process called intercalation (see picture).
When the battery is charged too fast, lithium ions tend to accumulate on top of the anode surface, leading to destructive "plating" behavior.
"Plating is one of the main reasons for battery performance impairment during fast charging," said Argonne scientist Daniel Abraham. "When we quickly charged the battery, we found that in addition to the coating on the anode surface, reaction products also accumulated in the electrode holes."
The team used scanning electron nano-diffraction to observe at the atomic level and found that the carbon lattice near the particle surface was permanently deformed due to repeated rapid charging (up to 6C). The lattice disorder reaches about 20 nanometers within the particle, and prevents ions from drifting to the edge of the lattice for intercalation. Instead, they are plated on the surface of the particles.
“The faster we charge the battery, the more disordered the anode’s atoms, which will eventually prevent lithium ions from moving back and forth,” Abraham said. "The key is to find a way to prevent this tissue loss, or to modify the graphite particles in some way so that lithium ions can be inserted more effectively."
This work is described in the extensive and clear paper "Disordered increase in the edges of graphite particles revealed by multi-length scale characterization of anodes in fast-charging lithium-ion batteries" published in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, which also describes Other damage mechanisms were analyzed in a comprehensive project with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Tagged with: Anode battery carbon electric vehicle lithium ion battery reliability
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