Building Better Batteries

A joint team of researchers from Caltech and Carnegie Mellon University has measured for the first time the strength of lithium metal at the nano- and microscale, a discovery with important implications for suppressing dendrite formation and improving lithium-ion batteries.

Using a special vacuum chamber at Caltech, the team of researchers formed pillars of single-crystal lithium a few micrometers tall and some nanometers to micrometers in diameter. Each of these single crystalline lithium pillars was extracted from a larger piece of lithium, and thus each had a particular crystallographic orientation—a particular angle with respect to the original sample.

The researchers discovered that at this size, lithium is up to 100 times stronger than previous measurements indicated. Additionally, collaborators at Carnegie Mellon University calculated how the stiffness of lithium dendrites varied with the crystallographic orientation and discovered that it could be as different as a factor of four.

Read more at Caltech

Image Credit: Caltech

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