Adam Maraschky, a PhD student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and his advisor Rohan Akolkar, the F. Alex Nason Professor and faculty director of the Great Lakes Energy Institute, recently published a paper in Journal of Electrochemical Society.
Titled “Mechanism Explaining the Onset Time of Dendritic Lithium Electrodeposition via Considerations of the Li+ Transport within the Solid Electrolyte Interphase,” their research focuses on rechargeable lithium-metal batteries, which face barriers to commercial implementation due to unsafe and limited recharging. The paper explains the cause of dendrite growth during recharge using experiments and modeling to show that concentration gradients within a surface film called the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) are responsible for dendrite growth.
Read the paper at the Journal of Electrochemical Society website.