Sintering or frittage is the process of compacting and forming a solid mass of material by pressure or heat without melting it to the point of liquefaction. Sintering happens as part of a manufacturing process used with metals, ceramics, plastics, and other materials. The nanoparticles in the sintered material diffuse across the boundaries of the particles, fusing the particles together and creating a solid piece.
A lithium-ion or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery that uses the reversible intercalation of Li+ ions into electronically conducting solids to store energy. In comparison with other commercial rechargeable batteries, Li-ion batteries are characterized by higher specific energy, higher energy density, higher energy efficiency, a longer cycle life, and a longer calendar life. Also noteworthy is a dramatic improvement in lithium-ion battery properties after their market introduction in 1991: within the next 30 years, their volumetric energy density increased threefold while their cost dropped tenfold.
John Bannister Goodenough was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1996 he was a professor of Mechanical, Materials Science, and Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with identifying the Goodenough–Kanamori rules of the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, with developing materials for computer random-access memory and with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.
In materials science, a grain boundary is the interface between two grains, or crystallites, in a polycrystalline material. Grain boundaries are two-dimensional defects in the crystal structure, and tend to decrease the electrical and thermal conductivity of the material. Most grain boundaries are preferred sites for the onset of corrosion and for the precipitation of new phases from the solid. They are also important to many of the mechanisms of creep. On the other hand, grain boundaries disrupt the motion of dislocations through a material, so reducing crystallite size is a common way to improve mechanical strength, as described by the Hall–Petch relationship.
John Werner Cahn was an American scientist and recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science. Born in Cologne, Weimar Germany, he was a professor in the department of metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1964 to 1978. From 1977, he held a position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Cahn had a profound influence on the course of materials research during his career. One of the foremost authorities on thermodynamics, Cahn applied the basic laws of thermodynamics to describe and predict a wide range of physical phenomena.
Ceramic engineering is the science and technology of creating objects from inorganic, non-metallic materials. This is done either by the action of heat, or at lower temperatures using precipitation reactions from high-purity chemical solutions. The term includes the purification of raw materials, the study and production of the chemical compounds concerned, their formation into components and the study of their structure, composition and properties.
Michael Stanley Whittingham is a British-American chemist. He is a professor of chemistry and director of both the Institute for Materials Research and the Materials Science and Engineering program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He also serves as director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) of the U.S. Department of Energy at Binghamton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough.
Angela M. Belcher is a materials scientist, biological engineer, and the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. She is director of the Biomolecular Materials Group at MIT, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and a 2004 MacArthur Fellow. In 2019, she was named head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
The lithium iron phosphate battery or LFP battery is a type of lithium-ion battery using lithium iron phosphate as the cathode material, and a graphitic carbon electrode with a metallic backing as the anode. Because of their low cost, high safety, low toxicity, long cycle life and other factors, LFP batteries are finding a number of roles in vehicle use, utility-scale stationary applications, and backup power. LFP batteries are cobalt-free. As of September 2022, LFP type battery market share for EVs reached 31%, and of that, 68% was from Tesla and Chinese EV maker BYD production alone. Chinese manufacturers currently hold a near monopoly of LFP battery type production. With patents having started to expire in 2022 and the increased demand for cheaper EV batteries, LFP type production is expected to rise further and surpass lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (NMC) type batteries in 2028.
Lithium iron phosphate or lithium ferro-phosphate (LFP) is an inorganic compound with the formula LiFePO
4. It is a gray, red-grey, brown or black solid that is insoluble in water. The material has attracted attention as a component of lithium iron phosphate batteries, a type of Li-ion battery. This battery chemistry is targeted for use in power tools, electric vehicles, solar energy installations and more recently large grid-scale energy storage.
The lithium–air battery (Li–air) is a metal–air electrochemical cell or battery chemistry that uses oxidation of lithium at the anode and reduction of oxygen at the cathode to induce a current flow.
William David Kingery was an American material scientist who developed systematic methods for the study of ceramics. For his work, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1999.
Research in lithium-ion batteries has produced many proposed refinements of lithium-ion batteries. Areas of research interest have focused on improving energy density, safety, rate capability, cycle durability, flexibility, and cost.
NASICON is an acronym for sodium (Na) super ionic conductor, which usually refers to a family of solids with the chemical formula Na1+xZr2SixP3−xO12, 0 < x < 3. In a broader sense, it is also used for similar compounds where Na, Zr and/or Si are replaced by isovalent elements. NASICON compounds have high ionic conductivities, on the order of 10−3 S/cm, which rival those of liquid electrolytes. They are caused by hopping of Na ions among interstitial sites of the NASICON crystal lattice.
Gerbrand Ceder is a Belgian–American scientist who is the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He has a joint appointment as a senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is notable for his pioneering research in high-throughput computational materials design, and in the development of novel lithium-ion battery technologies. He is co-founder of the Materials Project, an open-source online database of ab initio calculated material properties, which inspired the Materials Genome Initiative by the Obama administration in 2011. He is also the Founder and CTO of Pellion Technologies, which aims to commercialize magnesium-ion batteries. In 2017 Gerbrand Ceder was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering, "For the development of practical computational materials design and its application to the improvement of energy storage technology."
A semi-solid flow battery is a type of flow battery using solid battery active materials or involving solid species in the energy carrying fluid. A research team in MIT proposed this concept using lithium-ion battery materials. In such a system, both positive (cathode) and negative electrode (anode) consist of active material particles with carbon black suspended in liquid electrolyte. Active material suspensions are stored in two energy storage tanks. The suspensions are pumped into the electrochemical reaction cell when charging and discharging. This design takes advantage of both the designing flexibility of flow batteries and the high energy density active materials of lithium-ion batteries.
Lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO, Li7La3Zr2O12) or lithium lanthanum zirconate is a lithium-stuffed garnet material that is under investigation for its use in solid-state electrolytes in lithium-based battery technologies. LLZO has a high ionic conductivity and thermal and chemical stability against reactions with prospective electrode materials, mainly lithium metal, giving it an advantage for use as an electrolyte in solid-state batteries. LLZO exhibits favorable characteristics, including the accessibility of starting materials, cost-effectiveness, and straightforward preparation and densification processes. These attributes position this zirconium-containing lithium garnet as a promising solid electrolyte for all-solid-state lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
Lithium aluminium germanium phosphate, typically known with the acronyms LAGP or LAGPO, is an inorganic ceramic solid material whose general formula is Li
1+xAl
xGe
2-x(PO
4)
3. LAGP belongs to the NASICON family of solid conductors and has been applied as a solid electrolyte in all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries. Typical values of ionic conductivity in LAGP at room temperature are in the range of 10–5 - 10–4 S/cm, even if the actual value of conductivity is strongly affected by stoichiometry, microstructure, and synthesis conditions. Compared to lithium aluminium titanium phosphate (LATP), which is another phosphate-based lithium solid conductor, the absence of titanium in LAGP improves its stability towards lithium metal. In addition, phosphate-based solid electrolytes have superior stability against moisture and oxygen compared to sulfide-based electrolytes like Li
10GeP
2S
12 (LGPS) and can be handled safely in air, thus simplifying the manufacture process. Since the best performances are encountered when the stoichiometric value of x is 0.5, the acronym LAGP usually indicates the particular composition of Li
1.5Al
0.5Ge
1.5(PO
4)
3, which is also the typically used material in battery applications.
This is a history of the lithium-ion battery.
Vanessa Claire Wood is an American engineer who is a professor at the ETH Zurich. She holds a chair in Materials and Device Engineering and serves as Vice President of Knowledge Transfer and Corporate Relations.
