Design Principles for Architected Battery Electrodes

The properties of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are determined by the electrochemical and kinetic properties of their constituent materials as well as by their underlying microstructure. The discovery of 2D and 3D mesoscale architectures tailored to diverse applications remain an open challenge and it cannot be approached empirically. In this work, we leverage the design flexibility offered by several additive manufacturing methods (e.g. direct ink write, projection micro-stereolithography, etc.) to engineer the architecture of device electrodes. To explore this vast design space, we employ theoretical analyses and topology optimization techniques to determine printable electrode shapes. Our analyses produce general design guidelines, and three-dimensional CAD representations that optimize the battery architecture over specific performance metrics. In this talk, we show examples of electrode design driven by extreme operating conditions (e.g., low temperature) or by mechanical resilience. We also demonstrate an integrated workflow for model validation and guided experiments. For Li-metal anodes, our objective is to identify regimes of morphologically stable growth--where deleterious effects of dendrite growth might be avoided by microstructural design. For manganese-oxide cathodes, we develop physical models that capturethe pseudocapacitive response of the material and use them in inverse analyses to optimize the cathode architectures.