Better
batteries from the ground up
ORNL
microscopy explores the "room at the bottom" in lithium-ion batteries
Today,
people talk about their electronic devices almost as if they were living,
breathing beings. We wake our computers up, our cellphones die and we have
longer conversations with our GPS devices than with many of our friends.
As new
wireless technologies appear in devices from tablet computers to electric cars,
efforts to improve these life forms focus on a common organ: the heart-like
battery. Yet despite an accelerating demand for battery-powered devices, the
pulse of the electronics world is not as well understood as you might think.
"In
some sense, we think of batteries are ideal devices, but from a chemical
viewpoint, they are very complicated," says ORNL senior scientist Sergei
Kalinin. "Batteries look ideal only when they're inside a package, and you
don't care what's inside."
Kalinin is
among a team of scientists at ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences
that is developing new microscopic methods to analyze and understand nanoscale
complexities inside electrochemical systems such as lithium-ion batteries.
"Richard Feynman famously noted that there is plenty of room at the
bottom," Kalinin says, referring to the physicist's 1959 talk on the
potential of nanoscience. "This room does not do us much good if we cannot
explore it."
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