Researchers Use Hot Butter to Understand Battery Structure

Over the years, it has become apparent that fossil fuels, while quite effective, aren’t easy on the environment. Although solar and wind-generated energy coupled with battery storage systems have shown great promise as a clean, renewable replacement, we are a long way from full-scale adoption. One thing that stands in the way of widespread adoption of battery storage systems is slower charging and discharging speeds.

However, a team of scientists in Switzerland have found an interesting way to image the inside of a battery that could help find new ways of improving them. After pouring liquid butter into a battery and letting it harden, the scientists were able to make a cast of the ins and outs of its pores. A conventional lithium-ion battery has negative and positive layers that are prevented from touching by a polymer separator. The membrane is porous and should ideally allow lithium ions to flow freely and quickly through it.

70% of a lithium-ion battery is solid while 30% is porous space filled with a liquid electrolyte through which the lithium ions flow. The team of scientists removed the electrolyte and placed the separator into melted butter. The shop-bought butter seeped into the pores of the separator and hardened. “What’s nice about butter is that it pours as a liquid at relatively low temperatures then hardens at room temperature. Whether solid or liquid, it stays pretty much at the same volume, so it doesn’t distort the fine structural features of the separator,” says senior author Vanessa Wood.

The scientists then used a beam of gallium ions to cut away 10nm thick slice of the butter-filled separator and a scanning electron microscope recorded an image of the newly exposed polymer surface. This made it possible for a 3D reconstruction of the polymer to be made. Once the team examined the 3D images, they found that 13% of all conjunctions through the separator led to a dead end. They did not contribute to the flow of lithium-ions during battery charging and discharging.

“This paper tells us what the limiting factors are in separator performance. In this case, it is not about increasing porosity. It is about knowing how well the pores are connected together,” says Billy Wu, a battery researcher at Imperial College London, UK. “We want to be able to fast charge our electric vehicles and accelerate much better. In order to do that we need to optimize the structure of the materials that we have. That means making it easier for the lithium-ions to move back and forth between the anode and cathode.”

Experts say electric vehicle manufacturers like ElectraMeccanica Vehicles Corp. Ltd. (NASDAQ: SOLO) are likely to take keen interest in the work of these researchers since the findings could potentially revolutionize the battery industry.

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