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TAP TIMES -29- OCTOBER 2022

Battery discovery at Argonne What’s more, when cycled at high volt-
could impact grid, vehicles age (4.5 volts), a sodium-ion battery can
greatly increase the amount of energy that
LEMONT, Ill. — Researchers at Ar- can be stored in a given weight or volume.
gonne National Laboratories have un-
covered new avenues for overcoming Performance decline
the performance decline that occurs However, its fairly rapid performance de-
with repeated charge-discharge cy- cline with charge-discharge cycling has
cling in the cathodes of next genera- stymied commercialization.
tion batteries.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of En-
Greater-range needed ergy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory
Battery-powered vehicles have made a have discovered a key reason for the per-
signifi cant dent in the transportation mar- formance degradation: the occurrence of
ket. But that market still needs lower defects in the atomic structure that form
cost batteries that can power vehicles for during the steps involved in preparing the
greater ranges. cathode material.

Also desirable are low-cost batteries able Structural earthquake in the cathode
to store on the grid the intermittent clean These defects eventually lead to a struc-
energy from solar and wind technolo- tural earthquake in the cathode, resulting
in catastrophic performance decline during
gies and power hundreds of thousands of battery cycling. Armed with this knowl-
homes. edge, battery developers will now be able

to adjust synthesis conditions to fabricate
far superior sodium-ion cathodes.

Key to making this discovery was the
team’s reliance on the world-class sci-
entifi c capabilities available at Argonne’s
Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) and
Advanced Photon Source (APS), both of
which are DOE Offi ce of Science user facili-
ties.
Renditions of layer and strain direction in red, blue, green; blocks
and dots with graph labeled Tensile (c direction), Native strain, During cathode synthesis, material fabrica-
Shear. At right, image of newly synthesized cathode material tors slowly heat the cathode mixture to a
(left). Schematic shows strain and stress induced into the layered
cathode structure (right). (Argonne National Laboratory) very high temperature in air, hold it there
for a set amount of time, then rapidly drop
To meet those needs, researchers around the temperature to room temperature.
the world are racing to develop batteries
beyond the current standard of lithium-ion “Our insights are extremely important for
materials. One of the more promising can- the large-scale manufacturing of improved
didates is the sodium-ion battery. sodium-ion cathodes,” noted Khalil Amine,

an Argonne Distinguished Fellow. The re-
It is particularly attractive because of the search appeared recently in Nature Com-
greater abundance and lower cost of so- munications. anl.gov
dium compared to lithium.