The electrode tortuosity factor: why the conventional tortuosity factor is not well suited for quantifying transport in porous Li-ion battery electrodes and what to use instead

The tortuosity factor of porous battery electrodes is an important parameter used to correlate electrode microstructure with performance through numerical modeling. Therefore, having an appropriate method for the accurate determination of tortuosity factors is critical. This paper presents a numeric...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:npj computational materials 2020-08, Vol.6 (1), Article 123
Main Authors: Nguyen, Tuan-Tu, Demortière, Arnaud, Fleutot, Benoit, Delobel, Bruno, Delacourt, Charles, Cooper, Samuel J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/301/299/1013
639/301/299/891
Analytical chemistry
Characterization and Evaluation of Materials
Chemical engineering
Chemical Sciences
Chemistry and Materials Science
Computational Intelligence
Computer simulation
Design optimization
Electrodes
Engineering Sciences
Lithium-ion batteries
Materials
Materials Science
Mathematical and Computational Engineering
Mathematical and Computational Physics
Mathematical Modeling and Industrial Mathematics
Mathematical models
Microstructure
Percolation
Rechargeable batteries
Simulation
Theoretical
Tortuosity
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Summary:The tortuosity factor of porous battery electrodes is an important parameter used to correlate electrode microstructure with performance through numerical modeling. Therefore, having an appropriate method for the accurate determination of tortuosity factors is critical. This paper presents a numerical approach, based on simulations performed on numerically-generated microstructural images, which enables a comparison between two common experimental methods. Several key issues with the conventional “flow through” type tortuosity factor are highlighted, when used to characterise electrodes. As a result, a new concept called the “electrode tortuosity factor” is introduced, which captures the transport processes relevant to porous electrodes better than the “flow through” type tortuosity factor. The simulation results from this work demonstrate the importance of non-percolating (“dead-end”) pores in the performance of real electrodes. This is an important result for optimizing electrode design that should be considered by electrochemical modelers. This simulation tool is provided as an open-source MATLAB application and is freely available online as part of the TauFactor platform.
ISSN:2057-3960
2057-3960
DOI:10.1038/s41524-020-00386-4