Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering
Design and Optimization of Three-Dimensional Electrodes for Lithium Ion Batteries
Have you noticed your phone loses its charge sooner when it gets old? This is because your battery capacity decreases over time. One of the reasons is the small cracks you make in your battery by charging and discharging it. But how this happens? In the battery charging and discharging cycle Lithium atoms are going back and forth from one solid electrode (positive or negative) to the other one. Obviously, these atoms need space inside the host electrodes so they push back the host atoms and start tiny cracks which get larger and larger by repeating this process. We are trying to reduce these cracks by making smarter electrode designs and eventually make batteries with higher capacities.