Designing Electrode Slurries for Battery Manufacturing

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship under the supervision of Dr. Carl Reynolds. The successful applicant would join the Energy Materials Group in the school of Metallurgy and Materials at The University of Birmingham (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/energy/research/centre-energy-storage/energy-materials-group). The projected start date is 23rd September 2024 but flexibility is possible.

Battery manufacturing is a highly topical research area with the drive to electrify transportation, and there will need to be rapid expansion in current manufacturing capacity to cope with demand. The manufacturing processes for battery electrodes (and many other manufacturing processes), involves complex flow of mixtures of suspended particles, dissolved polymers and surfactants in a solvent. Active materials are mixed with polymeric binders, conductive additives and dispersants into a solvent to make a slurry, which is coated onto a current collector foil.[1,2] This is then dried and calendared (compressed) to form the final electrode. In this process the rheological properties (flow behaviour) of the electrode slurries are key to achieving target coating thickness and coatweight, and avoiding defects. However, due to the complex nature of the slurries, the origins of their rheology is unclear, and thus targeting specific rheological properties is difficult to achieve.[3]

This project will help to address this by building fundamental understanding of the rheology of electrode slurries from the bottom up, by starting from idealised components i.e. monodisperse polymers, narrow size distribution particles, and building to reach the industrial level of complexity. Advanced metrology (measurement techniques) [4] will be used to characterise the materials, for the rheological and surface properties of the fluids, as well as the materials properties of the components (e.g. particle sizes, polymer molecular weight) and the properties of the resulting coatings (e.g. thickness/coatweight conductivity, performance in a cell). Through this approach of increasing complexity, analogues for battery materials will be identified, which retain their essential properties but allow the expansion of the metrology possible e.g. the opacity of electrode studies prevents many optical image tracking methods, but with a non-opaque analogue these studies would be possible.

The understanding developed will be used to design complex fluids, building up nano- and micro-scale effects to control the fluid structure. The project will design systems leveraging different components, ratios, solvent systems and mixing, and characterise the fluid structure using advanced metrology. Thus, an understanding of the relationships between formulation, structure, and resulting fluid properties will be developed. The experimental data generated will be fed into physical and data-driven modelling to extract universal relationships for fluids design and testing them in the battery manufacturing process. Depending on the interests of the applicant, this modelling could be done in-house or through collaborations with project partners. The project is intentionally broad to allow the successful applicant to direct the focus to their own interests and develop independently as a researcher.

The applicant should have an undergraduate or masters level degree in a relevant discipline, such as but not limited to: Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering. Experience could be either in experimental techniques or modelling, but a willingness and enthusiasm for working in a lab and undertaking experimental characterisation is vital. Please contact c.d.reynolds@bham.ac.uk with any questions on eligibility.

Please note this project is open to UK applicants only. To apply, please first send a CV and cover letter summarizing your research interests and suitability for the position to c.d.reynolds@bham.ac.uk and feel free to get in touch with any queries in advance.