Engineering research could result in faster, stronger batteries

Boise State students Sarah Pooley and Kincaid Graff work in Professor Hui (Claire) Xiong's lab

Every time someone plugs in an electic vehicle, powers a laptop or draws electricity from the grid during a heat wave, they're relying on a battery to safely hold and deliver energy.

As the demand for electricity grows, engineers are racing to build stable batteries that store more energy, charge faster and last longer.

At Boise State, Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering Professor Hui (Claire) Xiong is leading a new research effort that could change the way batteries are made.

Backed by a National Science Foundation award, the three-year collaborative project brings together experimental materials science, national laboratory partnerships and machine learning to answer a deceptively simple question: what actually happens, atom by atom, when a battery material is charged and discharged?

Professor Hui (Claire) Xiong

A new battery approach

Conventionally, electrode materials are manufactured through solid-state synthesis, a method which typically requires high temperatures to force atoms into a stable, ordered crystal structure. Xiong's research is working to design and synthesize electrode materials that can store more energy and charge quickly from rechargeable batteries.

"The challenge is that as batteries are pushed toward higher energy and higher power, they become more unstable. A tension every battery engineer knows well," Xiong said.

Rather than using heat, Xiong's Electrochemical Energy Materials Laboratory uses the same charge and discharge cycling process a battery undergoes during normal use to drive materials from a disordered, "amorphous" structure into a crystalline one.

"Prior research, including those from my lab, have shown that electrochemical cycling may present a new synthetic avenue to obtain novel structures and frameworks," Xiong said.

Crucially, this pathway can produce materials in what scientists call a "metastable" state: a state in which structures sit outside true thermodynamic equilibrium.

"Such materials often exhibit distinct structures and properties, giving rise to unique and potentially enhanced functional behavior," Xiong said. She added that metastable materials have already opened doors in energy, electronic and catalysis research.

Why metal oxides?

The project's materials will focus on titanium oxide, niobium oxide, tantalum oxide and related mixed oxides. Theory and modeling have predicted that those three metal oxide systems have high potentials to obtain a metastable rock salt phase.

As these transformations unfold, Xiong's team will watch the atomic structure change in real time, rather than examining materials before and after. That real time, atomic-scale view will be paired with computational firepower.

Working with co-principal investigator Mark Dellostritto of Temple University, Xiong's team will apply machine learning and first-principles simulations to complement the experiments.

"Machine learning and first-principles simulations can complement experiments to elucidate the mechanisms of the electrochemically driven amorphous-to-crystalline transformation, such as kinetic pathways, driving forces, and ion effect," Xiong said.

These simulations can calculate how atoms and electrons in the oxides arrange themselves, allowing researchers to predict which materials might form a metastable phase before ever synthesizing them in the lab.

Boise State student Jiacheng Hu works in Xiong's lab

Faster charging, longer battery life, higher capacity

If successful, this project's results would touch nearly every metric that matters for battery performance.

"We have one U.S. patent pending for a similar concept," Xiong said. "The success would be a new synthesis method to make electrode materials with faster charging, longer battery life, high capacity - all of them."

This latest research project builds on Xiong's earlier NSF CAREER award and will also rely on partnerships with three national laboratories: Brookhaven National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. Xiong noted the collaboration provides support and access to tools and techniques few university labs can access on their own.

"Research on electrode materials for rechargeable batteries brings chemistry, materials design, electrochemistry and engineering together to address important challenges in energy storage," Xiong said.

Xiong added that students in her research lab will graduate with rare hands-on experiences in electrochemical processing and characterization, and direct exposure to working with national lab facilities.

"Ultimately, I hope this work will lay the foundation for a 'synthesis-by-design' framework where we can build a systemic way to engineer battery materials from the atom up, built for high-performance energy storage systems the next decade will demand," Xiong said.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation's Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET) under award No. 2622543. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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