Lithium iron phosphate battery particles provide valuable clues, MIT researchers discovered, when they mined data from X-Ray images. Their observation of lithium ions flowing through a battery interface gave clues to how to optimize them. Equally intriguingly, they noticed the flow rate varied. Some regions “seemed to be fast while others seemed to be slow”, they reported.
Tracking Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery Particles
This topic is too deep to unpack in a single post. Hence, we append a link to the MIT press release below. The MIT team used a technique called ‘tunneling X-Ray microscopy’ to obtain detailed images of individual lithium ions. These images revealed ‘the concentration of lithium ions, pixel-by-pixel, at every point in the particle’.
They scanned these lithium iron phosphate battery particles several times as they charged and discharged. Quite incredibly, they were able to use the result to create movies of how lithium ions flowed in and out of the particles.
What the Team Learned When They Watched the Movies
The MIT researchers analyzed images of 63 lithium iron phosphate particles as they charged and discharged. Particularly interestingly, they behaved very similarly to the computer simulations they prepared earlier.
“Every little pixel in there is jumping from full to empty, full to empty,” the senior author later recalled. “And we’re mapping that whole process, using our equations to understand how that’s happening,”
The MIT team hopes their work will help discover the physics behind complex patterns in images of other materials. This could extend not only to other types of batteries, but also biological systems such as dividing cells in a developing embryo.
“What I find most exciting about this work is the ability,” the study author continues. “To take images of a system that’s undergoing the formation of some pattern, and learning the principles that govern that.”
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Preview Image: Schematic of Lithium-Ion Cell
