Chemical Sustainability Seminar

The lithium-ion battery is the dominant architecture for current high-performance rechargeable batteries, and has seen steady improvement in energy density and cost over the past decades. However, achieving further breakthroughs in energy density requires us to consider ‘beyond Li-ion’ candidate battery concepts. One such general concept is the use of metal anodes, where we simply remove the anode intercalation material we currently use and instead cycle the active metal ion to and from its metallic state directly. While this grants excellent theoretical performances, the lack of a stabilising anode host structure leads to formidable degradation problems that prevent their use. Understanding what leads to these performance losses, and designing schemes to prevent them, are of great current interest.

In this seminar I will discuss my research on using operando transmission electron microscopy (TEM)¹ to directly observe metal anodes while they are being electrochemically cycled. This allows us to gain some insights into the nanoscale structural changes that occur, and to thus better understand the causes of performance decay. By manipulating the composition of the electrolyte, by changing the solvent or by including additives, we can then attempt to limit such degradation.^2,3