Architecting for Mass Transport: It Is More Than Just Tortuosity

Abstract

Mass transport is performance-defining across energy storage devices. An example of this limitation is evident in energy dense lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), which develop concentration gradients from insufficient transport of lithium-ions (Li-ions) when operated at high current rates. This results in lowered capacity and energy due to underutilized active material and increased overpotential. The movement of Li-ions, or lack thereof is the root cause of the trade-off that exists between energy and power density in LIBs. To alleviate societal demur towards the full adoption of electric vehicles, range anxiety and slow charging are predominant challenges that industry and academia are rushing to overcome. These goals may require reimagined processing methods to move beyond planar electrodes with disorganized and heterogeneous porosity to create architectures that are dense in active material and contain tailored porosity. To maximize the geometric component of diffusion and species flux, porous low-tortuosity channels are a rational design choice, as they act as mass-transport highways for much needed through-plane Li-ion transport.One such innovative process is hybrid inorganic phase inversion (HIPI), a manufacturing method that is scalable, material-agnostic and results in low-tortuosity free-standing and monolithic architectures with tunable material-to-pore ratios. The HIPI process can enable electrodes with adjustable thicknesses of 100s of µm and relevant micro-architectural feature sizes between 5-40 µm, tailored by tuning the gelation temperature and nucleation density of the inorganic suspension during the nonequilibrium HIPI process. Importantly, the use of a soft organogel casting support results in the unhindered accessibility of the low-tortuosity pores present in the HIPI architectures.HIPI-architected anode and cathode electrodes exhibit electrochemical and architectural stability over a 1000 cycles in a full-cell battery. Further, mass-transport constraints appear at high current densities, and we identify the lithiation step as rate-performance limiting, a result of insufficient Li-ion supply and concentration polarization. Thus, for energy and power dense LIBs the answer is not simply mass-transport highways as unoptimized low-tortuosity channels, rather in-plane Li-ion demands must be tethered to the through-plane transport. Our results demonstrate the need for and feasibility of tailored electrode architectures where dimensional ratios between low-tortuosity channels, the charge-storing matrix, and electrode thickness are tunable, to both understand multi-scale structure-performance relationships and meet coupled power and energy-storage requirements.