Tag: material science

Revitalizing batteries by bringing ‘dead’ lithium back to life


An animation shows how charging and discharging a lithium battery test cell causes an island of “dead,” or detached, lithium metal to creep back and forth between the electrodes. The movement of lithium ions back and forth through the electrolyte creates areas of negative (blue) and positive (red) charge at the ends of the island, which swap places as the battery charges and discharges. Lithium metal accumulates at the negative end of the island and dissolves at the positive end; this continual growth and dissolution causes the back-and-forth movement seen here. SLAC and Stanford researchers discovered that adding a brief, high-current discharging step right after charging the battery nudges the island to grow in the direction of the anode, or negative electrode. Reconnecting with the anode brings the island’s dead lithium back to life and increases the battery’s lifetime by nearly 30%. (Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.)

Menlo Park, Calif. — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University may have found a way to revitalize rechargeable lithium batteries, potentially boosting the range of electric vehicles and battery life in next-gen electronic devices.

As lithium batteries cycle, they accumulate little islands of inactive lithium that are cut off from the electrodes, decreasing the battery’s capacity to store charge. But the research team discovered that they could make this “dead” lithium creep like a worm toward one of the electrodes until it reconnects, partially reversing the unwanted process.

Adding this extra step slowed the degradation of their test battery and increased its lifetime by nearly 30%.

“We are now exploring the potential recovery of lost capacity in lithium-ion batteries using an extremely fast discharging step,” said Stanford postdoctoral fellow Fang Liu, the lead author of a study published Dec. 22 in Nature.

Lost connection

A great deal of research is looking for ways to make rechargeable batteries with lighter weight, longer lifetimes, improved safety, and faster charging speeds than the lithium-ion technology currently used in cellphones, laptops and electric vehicles. A particular focus is on developing lithium-metal batteries, which could store more energy per volume or weight. For example, in electric cars, these next-generation batteries could increase the mileage per charge and possibly take up less trunk space.

Both battery types use positively charged lithium ions that shuttle back and forth between the electrodes. Over time, some of the metallic lithium becomes electrochemically inactive, forming isolated islands of lithium that no longer connect with the electrodes. This results in a loss of capacity and is a particular problem for lithium-metal technology and for the fast charging of lithium-ion batteries.

However, in the new study, the researchers demonstrated that they could mobilize and recover the isolated lithium to extend battery life.

“I always thought of isolated lithium as bad, since it causes batteries to decay and even catch on fire,” said Yi Cui, a professor at Stanford and SLAC and investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Research (SIMES) who led the research. “But we have discovered how to electrically reconnect this ‘dead’ lithium with the negative electrode to reactivate it.”

Creeping, not dead

The idea for the study was born when Cui speculated that applying a voltage to a battery’s cathode and anode could make an isolated island of lithium physically move between the electrodes – a process his team has now confirmed with their experiments.

The scientists fabricated an optical cell with a lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt-oxide (NMC) cathode, a lithium anode and an isolated lithium island in between. This test device allowed them to track in real time what happens inside a battery when in use.

They discovered that the isolated lithium island wasn’t “dead” at all but responded to battery operations. When charging the cell, the island slowly moved towards the cathode; when discharging, it crept in the opposite direction.

“It’s like a very slow worm that inches its head forward and pulls its tail in to move nanometer by nanometer,” Cui said. “In this case, it transports by dissolving away on one end and depositing material to the other end. If we can keep the lithium worm moving, it will eventually touch the anode and reestablish the electrical connection.”

Boosting lifetime

The results, which the scientists validated with other test batteries and through computer simulations, also demonstrate how isolated lithium could be recovered in a real battery by modifying the charging protocol.

“We found that we can move the detached lithium toward the anode during discharging, and these motions are faster under higher currents,” said Liu. “So we added a fast, high-current discharging step right after the battery charges, which moved the isolated lithium far enough to reconnect it with the anode. This reactivates the lithium so it can participate in the life of the battery.”

She added, “Our findings also have wide implications for the design and development of more robust lithium-metal batteries.”

This work was funded by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Vehicle Technologies under the Battery Materials Research (BMR), Battery 500 Consortium and eXtreme Fast Charge Cell Evaluation of Li-ion batteries (XCEL) programs.

This is a reposting of a press release, courtesy of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Floppy vibration modes explain negative thermal expansion in solids

Animation showing how solid crystals of ScF3 shrink upon heating. While the bonds between scandium (green) and fluorine (blue) remain relatively rigid, the fluorine atoms along the sides of the cubic crystals oscillate independently, resulting in a wide range of distances between neighboring fluorine atoms. The higher the temperature, the greater the buckling in the sides of the crystals leading to the overall contraction (negative thermal expansion) effect. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Matching the thermal expansion values of materials in contact is essential when manufacturing precision tools, engines, and medical devices. For example, a dental filling would cause a toothache if it expanded a different amount than the surrounding tooth when drinking a hot beverage. Fillings are therefore comprised of a composite of materials with positive and negative thermal expansion, creating an overall expansion tailored to the tooth enamel.

The underlying mechanisms of why crystalline materials with negative thermal expansion (NTE) shrink when heated have been a matter of scientific debate. Now, a multi-institutional research team led by Igor Zaliznyak, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, believes it has the answer.

As recently reported in Science Advances, the scientists measured the distance between atoms in scandium trifluoride powder, a cubic NTE material—at temperatures ranging from 2 K to 1099 K—using total neutron diffraction. The research team determined the probability that two particular atomic species would be found at a given distance. They studied scandium trifluoride because it has a simple atomic structure in which each scandium atom is surrounded by an octahedron of fluorine atoms. According to the prevailing rigid-unit-mode (RUM) theory, each fluorine octahedron should vibrate and move as a rigid unit when heated — but that is not what they observed.

“We found that the distances between scandium and fluorine were pretty rigidly-defined until a temperature of about 700 K, but the distances between the nearest-neighbor fluorines became ill-defined at temperatures above 300 K,” says Zaliznyak. “Their probability distributions became very broad, which is basically a direct manifestation of the fact that the shape of the octahedron is not preserved. If the fluorine octahedral had been rigid, the fluorine-fluorine distance would have been as well defined as scandium-fluorine.”

With the help of high school researcher David Wendt and condensed matter theorist Alexei Tkachenko, Zaliznyak developed a simple model to explain these experimental results. The team went back to the basics—the fundamental laws of physics.

“When we removed the ill-controlled constraint that there must be these rigid units, then we could explain the fundamental interactions that govern the atomic positions in the [ScF3] solid using just Coulomb interactions.”

The team developed a negative thermal expansion model that treats each Sc-F bond as a rigid monomer link and the entire ScF3 crystal structure as a floppy, under-constrained network of freely jointed monomers. Each scandium ion is constrained by rigid bonds in all three directions, whereas each fluorine ion is free to vibrate and displace orthogonally to its Sc-F bonds. This is a direct three-dimensional analogy of the well-established behavior of chainlike polymers. And their simple theory agreed remarkably well with their experiments, accurately predicting the distribution of distances between the nearest-neighbor fluorine pairs for all temperatures where NTE was observed.   

“Basically we figured out how these ceramic materials contract on warming and how to make a simple calculation that describes this phenomenon,” Zaliznyak says.

Angus Wilkinson, an expert on negative thermal expansion materials at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is not involved in the project, agrees that Zaliznyak’s work will change the way people think about negative thermal expansion in solids.

“While the RUM picture of NTE has been questioned for some time, the experimental data in this paper, along with the floppy network (FN) analysis, provide a compelling alternative view,” says Wilkinson. “I very much like the way the FN approach is applicable to both soft matter systems and crystalline materials. The floppy network analysis is novel and gives gratifyingly good agreement with a wide variety of experimental data.”

According to Zaliznyak, the next major step of their work will be to study more complex materials that exhibit NTE behavior now that they know what to look for.

Read the article in Science Advances.

This is a reposting of my news brief, courtesy of MRS Bulletin.

Ultrafast Laser Synchronization Breakthrough

AMO experiment schematic
Set-up of a nitrogen pulse-pump experiment that uses pulse arrival time information from a cross-correlator mounted downstream from the experiment. Figure courtesy of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

A journal article, just published in Applied Physics Letters, details a major breakthrough for experiments at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).

LCLS delivers intense ultrashort x-ray pulses that can be used to study the motion of atoms as they respond to external triggers, such as an optical laser. In these “pump-probe” experiments, the optical laser “pump” pulse starts a reaction in the material, while the x-ray “probe” pulse investigates the state of the material after a defined time delay. A sequence of x-ray pulses, with different time delays between the laser and x-ray pulses, is used to “film” the reaction in the material.

LCLS ultrafast x-ray pulses basically act like high-speed flashes of a camera strobe, allowing scientists to capture images with a “shutter speed” of less than 100 femtoseconds – the time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair.

In order to be able to “film” optically-induced ultrafast processes, however, scientists need more than just ultrashort x-ray and laser pulses. They also need to synchronize the x-ray pulses to the optical laser pulses with almost femtosecond accuracy, in order to have snapshots with good time resolution (“sharp focus”). This is a major challenge, since the main laser system for the x-ray free electron laser is a kilometer away from the optical laser and experiment.

State-of-the-art synchronization is performed at LCLS by accurately measuring the arrival times of the electron bunches (and corresponding x-ray pulses) relative to the radiofrequency that drives the accelerator, since the optical laser is locked to this reference radiofrequency. The best time resolution so far achieved with this approach is 280 fs (full width at half maximum, FWHM).

Recently, scientists at the LCLS Atomic, Molecular and Optical Science Instrument (AMO) dramatically improved the time resolution for their pump-probe experiments. Their new synchronization strategy is to directly measure the relative arrival time of both the x-ray and optical laser pulses at the experiment on a shot-by-shot basis. They do this by introducing into the x-ray beam what they call a cross-correlator, which is mounted downstream of the main experiment.

AMO scientists split their laser beam, sending it to both a pump-probe experiment and the cross-correlator (with a time delay). In the cross-correlator, the laser beam is reflected off a Si3N4 thin film. The spot of the laser pulse is then imaged with a long-distance microscope on a CCD camera. X-ray pulses also hit the same surface of the Si3N4 film, quasi-instantaneously changing the surface reflectivity.

The x-ray pulse very briefly changes the surface reflectivity. By imaging and measuring the position of this reflectivity change with the reflected laser, AMO scientists can directly measure the relative arrival time of the x-ray and optical laser pulses at their experiment. The scientists then use this pulse arrival time information from the cross-correlator to correct their corresponding experimental data on a shot-by-shot basis.

The AMO team demonstrated their improved time resolution with a nitrogen pump-probe experiment. With the time information from the cross-correlator, they were able to decrease the time resolution of their nitrogen experiment down to only 50 fs (FWHM). That’s almost down to the theoretical limit, allowing scientists to investigate all sorts of new ultrafast science.

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