Abstract

During lithium-ion battery electrode fabrication, slurry drying conditions influence the resulting microstructure of electrodes. It has been found that the drying conditions can result in non-uniform cathode microstructures and material distributions. Accelerated drying, for example, is widely assumed to cause the binder in an electrode to migrate within the slurry, which can contribute to adhesion failure, and ultimately capacity fade and reduced battery life. While there are some conflicting studies regarding the aspects of accelerated drying that cause binder migration, there is not a widely used standard metric for measuring the gradient of binder across the thickness of an electrode. In this work, the vertical heterogeneity of electrodes, as measured using energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), is correlated with different drying methods and rates. An improved metric for measuring the binder gradient in electrodes is proposed. For the electrodes in this study, binder migration is minimally affected by the drying method and the normalized binder gradient does not increase with increased drying rate. The results are compared to a drying physics model, and it is shown that further development of current models that predict binder gradient as a function of drying rate will need to be modified to more fully capture the physics of slurry drying.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2019-09-01

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd11383

Keywords

lithium-ion batteries, x-ray spectroscopy, binder gradients, drying

Language

English

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