Understanding and Evaluating the Design Space for Practical Solid-State Batteries

Abstract

Solid-state batteries are promising alternatives for high-energy and -power-density rechargeable battery applications. It is vital to design and engineer SSB cells that can compete and improve on the current Li-ion battery counterparts. However, limited approaches exist today to assess and extrapolate the impact of battery designs and choices of cell components on the cell-level energy density of a solid-state battery. Herein, we introduce the Solid-State Battery Performance Analyzer and Calculator (SolidPAC), an interactive experimental toolkit to enable the design of a solid-state battery for user-specified application requirements. The toolkit is flexible enough to assist the battery community in quantifying the impact of materials chemistry and fractions, electrode thicknesses and loadings, and electron flows on cell energy density and costs and in utilizing inverse engineering concepts to correlate the cell energy density output to materials and cell design inputs. In addition to this, we will discuss a geometric modeling of composite cathode architectures to assess its impact on cell-level energy densities. Impact of packing architecture on processing parameters of a given cathode composition and thickness, as well as on achievable energy density is evaluated for a range of commonly used solid electrolyte and cathode materials. Overall, the proposed framework offers a facile exploratory methodology for establishing initial metrics for scalable processing of practical and competent SSBs.