Issue 4, 2018

Single-particle measurements of electrochemical kinetics in NMC and NCA cathodes for Li-ion batteries

Abstract

The electrochemical kinetics of battery electrodes at the single-particle scale are measured as a function of state-of-charge, and interpreted with the aid of concurrent transmission X-ray microscopy (TXM) of the evolving particle microstructure. An electrochemical cell operating with near-picoampere current resolution is used to characterize single secondary particles of two widely-used cathode compounds, NMC333 and NCA. Interfacial charge transfer kinetics are found to vary by two orders of magnitude with state-of-charge (SOC) in both materials, but the origin of the SOC dependence differs greatly. NCA behavior is dominated by electrochemically-induced microfracture, although thin binder coatings significantly ameliorate mechanical degradation, while NMC333 demonstrates strongly increasing interfacial reaction rates with SOC for chemical reasons. Micro-PITT is used to separate interfacial and bulk transport rates, and show that for commercially relevant particle sizes, interfacial transport is rate-limiting at low SOC, while mixed-control dominates at higher SOC. These results provide mechanistic insight into the mesoscale kinetics of ion intercalation compounds, which can guide the development of high performance rechargeable batteries.

Graphical abstract: Single-particle measurements of electrochemical kinetics in NMC and NCA cathodes for Li-ion batteries

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
01 Jan 2018
Accepted
27 Feb 2018
First published
15 Mar 2018
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Energy Environ. Sci., 2018,11, 860-871

Single-particle measurements of electrochemical kinetics in NMC and NCA cathodes for Li-ion batteries

P. Tsai, B. Wen, M. Wolfman, M. Choe, M. S. Pan, L. Su, K. Thornton, J. Cabana and Y. Chiang, Energy Environ. Sci., 2018, 11, 860 DOI: 10.1039/C8EE00001H

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements