Current research efforts in lithium batteries are directed towards achieving higher energy density at a reduced cost and increased safety and life. Most advanced battery chemistries such as metal-air and multivalent redox compounds have a number of fundamental material chemistry challenges. Key factors include limited diffusion and transport kinetics originating from intrinsic poor ionic and electron conductivity, structural and interfacial instability during repeated electrochemical cycling. To this effect, development of advanced characterization and diagnostic methods at materials (and interfaces) as well as at the system level are key enablers for understanding the current limitations and investigating various mechanistic pathways which could ultimately help towards practical development of such new redox energy storage systems.  The talk will cover recent progress and challenges towards applying neutron imaging and tomographic methods for studying lithium transport in battery electrodes. Examples include mapping the spatial distribution of lithium in thick air cathodes and observing region that have inhomogeneous lithium distribution.3 Recent results on in-situ neutron imaging of lithium diffusion in graphite anodes will be discussed as well. Modelling results that give additional insight into the spatiotemporal variation of Li as a function of diffusion and reaction coefficients will be presented. The second half of the talk will cover our recent studies on combining nanoscale x-ray imaging (TXM) with spectroscopy (XANES) to monitor changes in composition (phase) and morphology of Lithium-manganese rich-NMC composite cathodes. 3D tomography analysis of TXM-XANES images will be presented to quantify the cathode particle phase and morphology at different state of lithiation.Acknowledgement This research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725, is sponsored by the Vehicle Technologies Program for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The TXM at SSRL was supported by NIH/NIBIB under grant number 5R01EB004321.

Multiscale neutron and X-ray tomographic studies on high capacity lithium battery chemistries

248th National Meeting (2014)

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