Development and Evaluation of Next Generation Electrodes for Advanced Li-ion Batteries

The student will contribute to the development of new standard test protocols for evaluating Li (and post Li) batteries. This will develop robust standards for electrochemical characterisation and accelerated stress tests to provide an enhanced toolbox for standard characterisation of batteries and materials. Particular impact will be derived by the NEXTRODE programme where we will seek to rapidly evaluate materials from the programme, and provide robust benchmarking of performance versus the current state of the art.
The student will contribute to the development of advanced materials characterisation tools and establish protocols to translate these tools to a production environment. Alongside robust electrochemical benchmarking, the tools for electrode design will include advanced X-ray imaging and image based modelling and will provide unprecedented understanding of the performance/microstructure relationship. Translating this understanding to a production environment remains challenging; this raises the question. how will we know that our design intent has been effectively implemented? To address this the student will contribute to the design of 'proxy' measurements for electrode quality which can be applied in-line; these include electrical, acoustic, optical and X-ray measurements, which can be rapidly applied in the manufacturing process providing robust quality control, and verification of design hypotheses.