Funded projects

Paul Quinn (Co-Investigator) and Dorota Matras (PDRA) are part of the Faraday Institution's CATMAT project, which consists of three workpackages: (1) looking into fundamental mechanisms within the nickel-rich and lithium-rich cathode materials, (2) design of new cathode materials with enhanced properties and (3) their synthesis scale up. 

Their role is to investigate chemical and morphological changes occuring in the cathode materials, designed within the CATMAT project, by the appplication of X-ray techniques available at the I14 nanoprobe beamline. They are employing the X-ray absorption spectroscopy to investigate changes in the electronic state of the main cathode materials as well as the the X-ray fluorescence spectrosopy to determine the presence and the distribution of chemical elements. They combined these chemical techniques with projection mapping and tomography data collection strategies and to further improve the spatial resolution of the obtained images they also employ ptychography-based techniques.

In addition, they are looking into design of cells suitable for insitu/operando characterisation of battery materials.

Some examples from their work can be found in the following publications and presentations:

(1) Heenan et al., Identifying the Origins of Microstructural Defects Such as Cracking within Ni-Rich NMC811 Cathode Particles for Lithium-Ion Batteries. Adv. Energy Mater. 2020, 10, 2002655. 

(2) Dorota Matras, X-ray chemical imaging for characterisation of batteries – from electrode to device level, Faraday Institution Annual Conference 2021, Early career research day.