Lithium-ion battery research profiled in DOE newsletter

Work conducted by ISR Director Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR) and his research team at the Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage Energy Frontier Research Center (NEES EFRC) was profiled in the July 2014 issue of the U.S. Department of Energy’s online Energy Frontier Research Centers newsletter, Frontiers in Energy Research.

"A MEMS platform for in situ, real-time monitoring of electrochemically induced mechanical changes in lithium-ion battery electrodes" appeared in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. The authors were Ghodssi and his students and postdocs Ekaterina Pomerantseva, Hyun Jung, Markus Gnerlich, Sergio Baron and Konstantinos Gerasopoulos.

The research is an optical-based method to detect changes in the volume of a silicon anode as lithium ions move in and out. These changes in size are related to stress in the active battery material.

The method involves forming a battery underneath a miniature drum. As lithium ions are cycled in and out of a silicon anode, the resulting expansion and contraction of the silicon is measured from the constructive and destructive interference of light incident and reflected off the drum. A control experiment allowed the correlation to be made between the deflection of the drum and the stress in the battery.

The research enables real-time monitoring of lithium-ion battery expansion and contraction and the resulting internal stress. It will enable future researchers to rapidly study and screen materials being considered for lithium-ion batteries.

The Frontiers in Energy Research story was written by Jimmy O’Dea, a postdoc in the Energy Materials Center at Cornell University.

| Read about the research at the Frontiers in Energy Research website |

Published August 5, 2014