In 2016, their research teams published groundbreaking nanoscale movies of how lithium ions flow in and out of individual LFP nanoparticles. Chueh had been using an advanced X-ray microscope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Advanced Light Source to make nanoscale movies, with details as small as billionths of a meter, of battery particles at work.
Bazant had already done a lot of mathematical modeling of patterns formed by lithium ions as they move in and out of LFP particles. “We are seeing an increased use of LFP in the electric vehicle market, so the timing of this study could not be better.”Ĭhueh and Bazant started collaborating on battery research eight years ago. “Lithium iron phosphate is an important battery material due to low cost, a good safety record and its use of abundant elements,” said Brian Storey, senior director of Energy and Materials at the Toyota Research Institute, which funded the work at SLAC and MIT. When the battery charges, they flow back out again and travel to the opposite, negative electrode. When the battery discharges, lithium ions flow into the positive LFP electrode and lodge inside its nanoparticles like cars in a crowded parking garage, in a reaction called intercalation.
Coherent x ray full#
To watch what’s happening inside the battery while it operates, Chueh’s team builds tiny, transparent cell batteries in which two electrodes are surrounded by an electrolyte solution full of free-moving lithium ions. They’re packed by the billions into the positive electrodes of many lithium-ion batteries, each one coated with a thin layer of carbon to improve the electrode’s electrical conductivity. The battery particles the research team studied are made of lithium iron phosphate, or LFP. See-through batteries give up their secrets More broadly, the researchers said, this approach to discovering the physics behind complex patterns in images could even provide unprecedented insights into other types of chemical and biological systems, such as cells dividing in a developing embryo. “This is the kind of fundamental, science-based information that our partners in industry need to develop better batteries faster.” “Now we can extract insights that were not possible before,” Chueh said.
“Until now, we could make these beautiful X-ray movies of battery nanoparticles at work, but the movies were so information-rich that understanding the subtle details of how the particles function was a real challenge,” said William Chueh, a Stanford associate professor, SLAC faculty scientist and director of the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center, who co-led the study with MIT Professor Martin Bazant. The new method has already suggested a way to make the billions of nanoparticles in one type of lithium-ion battery electrode store and release charge more efficiently, researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Toyota Research Institute reported in Nature today. Now, in an important step forward, researchers have used a type of machine learning called “computer vision” to dig even deeper, analyzing each and every pixel of those X-ray movies to discover physical and chemical details of battery cycling that couldn’t be seen before. X-ray movies of this process show the particles absorbing and releasing lithium ions as the battery charges and discharges.
Billions of tiny particles packed into rechargeable lithium-ion battery electrodes are responsible for storing charge and making it available when it’s needed to do work.
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