Probing Dynamic Mass Transport at Multivalent Battery Interfaces

Abstract

The integration of electrochemistry and materials has developed rapidly over the past decade and is now a key contributor in many important applications, one emerging area is to design efficient energy storage devices at low cost. Many of these savings are driven by utilizing the higher abundance chemical elements from the earth's crust, for instance Zn, Mg or Ca. Despite some successful research advances in recent decades, there is a lack of an in-depth analysis of the electrolyte/electrode interface for multivalent battery systems. One major difficulty is the lack of capability to provide direct in-situ interfacial information without perturbing its chemical environment. Efforts from the presented work aim to probe and quantify the solid electrolyte interface formation in-situ. We aim to understand at the interface, how parasitic reactions affects or disrupts the mass transport processes and shuts down the cycling of the multivalent electrode material.