Investigating Lithium‐Ion Battery Electrode Drying Using Physics‐based Modeling

The drying of electrodes is one of the most energy‐intensive steps in lithium‐ion battery (LIB) manufacturing and plays an important role in determining the final electrode microstructure and transport properties, including porosity, permeability, and tortuosity. However, the drying process remains inadequately addressed due to the challenges associated with the intricate interactions between the porous medium and the free flow. This study addresses these issues by developinga fully coupled model of drying of LIB electrodes to characterize the key influential parameters, including velocity, initial temperature, cathode porosity, permeability, and electrode thickness. The findings indicate that the drying process can be categorized into three distinct stages of the low drying stage, the constant drying stage, and the high drying stage. The results show that most of the solvent evaporates in the initial stage. Furthermore, elevating both temperature and ventilation velocity lead to a significant reduction in drying time. Finally, the results indicate that the parameters giving the best performance in this model are a ventilation velocity of m/s, the initial temperature of K, the porosity of 58%, and the permeability value of .