Intellibat (1708)

Intellibat project is a co-funded project by European Union (EFRO) and a common initiative of Solithor, imec, and UHasselt to accelerate the development of advanced batteries by investing in a series of the state-of-the-art machines to be used for research and development of the batteries. Particularly, UHasselt will install an in-situ XRD machine in the institute for materials research (imo-imomec) to enable the an in-operando characterization of the the electrode materials during the cycling of batteries. The XRD fingerprint of the active-materials used in the formulation of the cathode and anodes of the advanced rechargeable batteries is usually sensitive to both the state-of-charge and state-of-health of the battery. Such a sensitivity can exist at two different time scales. First, a reversible change in the XRD pattern during a single cycle. Second, a gradual irreversible change in the crystal structure of the active-material particles during extensive cycling. In the first category, the reversible changes are usually due to the changes in the lattice dimension during the (de)insertion of the guest species into the host structure of the electrodes' active materials. In the second group, however, the continuous operation of the battery can lead to the degradation of the active-material particles manifesting for instance in the crystallographic phase transformations and abrupt lattice expansions. Such undesirable changes lead to the capacity loss and premature end-of-life. As such the XRD characterization is a powerful technique to investigate the aging and reliability of the cathode and anode materials for different battery technologies.