Electric vehicles are the best way to combat rising air pollution and carbon emissions. However, their success depends on battery performance. Nanotechnology scientists continually search for the perfect battery to reduce the price, increase durability and offer more miles on every charge.
One specific battery made of nickel, cobalt and aluminum (NCA) offers a high enough energy density (electricity stored in a battery), to work well in large-scale and long-range vehicles, including electric cars and commercial aircraft. However, there is one significant problem with these batteries, they degrade with each cycle of charge and discharge.
As the battery cycles, lithium ions move back and forth between cathode and anode, leaving behind detectable tracks of nanoscale damage. To make matters worse, the high temperature the vehicle produces can intensify these tracks of degradation and even cause the battery to fail completely.
“The relationship between structural changes and the catastrophic thermal runaway impacts both safety and performance,” said physicist Xiao-Qing Yang of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. “The in-depth understanding of that relationship will help us develop new materials and advance this NCA material to prevent that dangerous degradation.”
Researchers in Brookhaven Lab’s Chemistry Department and Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) completed a series of three studies, to gain a better understanding of the NCA battery’s electrochemical reactions. Each study took a closer look into the molecular changes. The work spanned x-ray-based exploration of average material morphologies to surprising atomic-scale asymmetries revealed by electron microscopy.
“After each cycle of charge/discharge — or even incremental steps in either direction — we saw the atomic structure transition from uniform crystalline layers into a disordered rock-salt configuration,” said Brookhaven Lab scientist Eric Stach, who leads CFN’s electron microscopy group. “During this transformation, oxygen leaves the destabilized battery compound. This excess oxygen, leached at faster and faster rates over time, actually contributes to the risk of failure and acts as fuel for a potential fire.”
These new and fundamental insights may help engineers develop superior battery chemistries or nanoscale architectures that block this degradation.
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