New Search
If you are not happy with the results below please do another search
Blog Post
Testing of Battery Materials with Mesh-type Reference Electrodes A long time ago, we advertised to use a finger-type (aka wire-type) reference electrode. Everything we wrote still holds. However, the bad news is that the finger-type reference electrode is no longer available. The good news is that we now have an even better solution: The mesh-type reference electrode. The new mesh-type reference comes in two variants: fine and coarse. Both have the same web width of 50 µm and web thickness of 25 µm but different mesh sizes (see pictures below). You will get the mesh ready assembled into our standard...
read more →
Blog Post
Sometimes a finger-shaped reference electrode can be better than our standard ring-shaped reference electrode. The finger reference measures the electrical potential in the middle of the stack instead of at the outer edge of the cell stack. This can help to minimize artifacts caused by inhomogeneities of the electric field. The finger is made of stainless steel and coated with polyimide, except for the measurement area at the end of the finger. Different geometries of the finger are available. -- The finger-shaped reference electrode is considered useful for several scenarios: It can be employed as a stainless steel pseudo-reference electrode....
read more →
Blog Post
What is a printed electrode? A printed electrode can be fabricated using techniques such as screen printing or inkjet printing which offer the advantage to produce structured electrodes. The electrode layers are printed onto a suitable substrate. These substrates can be divided into two categories: (i) insulating substrates such as polymer foils or paper coated with a thin conductive layer (e.g. a thin carbon layer) and (ii) conductive substrates such as copper or aluminium foil. The latter case – printed electrodes deposited on conductive substrates – can directly be tested using our conventional PAT-Cell or any other in-situ test cell....
read more →
Blog Post
Reliability meets Accuracy: Testing with PAT-Cell and PAT-Tester-i-16. We want to show the results of our last long-term measurement (2000 hours) with the PAT-Cell. The PAT-Cell is our reliable and well-proven workhorse for efficient three-electrode measurements in the field of battery material research. In this measurement, five PAT-Cells were cycled in our temperature-controlled PAT-Tester-i-16 potentiostat at 25°C (3.0 to 4.2 V, CC-CV cycles at 0.1 C rate, 1 hour hold time at both voltage limits). We tested NCM 111 against graphite as electrode materials, with a reference electrode made of lithium metal and LP30 with 2% VC as the...
read more →
Blog Post
Testing materials for lithium-ion batteries A battery is a can with two terminals named plus and minus, or 1 and 2. Testing this battery means that you apply either a voltage (V12) profile or a current (i12) profile across the two terminals, and measure the corresponding current or voltage response. The profile can have many different shapes such as square, triangle, sine, or some arbitrary profile. This concept applies to small and large battery cells as well as to arrays of such battery cells connected in series and/or in parallel (battery modules or packs). One could therefore think that...
read more →
Blog Post
Very often, Li-ion test cells are characterized in two separate experiments: first, constant current charge/discharge cycles are applied in order to learn about the direct current (dc) behavior of the battery, and, second, impedance tests are performed in order to learn about the alternating current (ac) behavior at different states of charge. With our new PAT-Tester-i-16, the two methods can be seamlessly combined in one single experiment. For this purpose, the constant current during charging and discharging is superimposed by a sinusoidal current of varying frequency. The short frequency sweep (10 kHz to 0.1 Hz, approx. 1 minute per sweep)...
read more →
Blog Post
This application note is supposed to be the first in a series dealing with the electrochemical testing of materials for lithium-ion batteries (LiB) using the PAT system from EL-CELL. More precisely, we will show you the advantages of the PAT-Cell (compared to other test cells like button, Swagelok and pouch cells) and the PAT battery testers (compared to other high-end battery cyclers, impedance analyzers and electrochemical workstations). For that purpose, we are going to look into typical test cases from the battery lab: full cells made up of NCM and graphite as the two electrodes, or so-called half cells comprised...
read more →
Blog Post
New cathode and anode materials for lithium ion batteries (LiB) are often tested for their electrochemical performance using lithium metal as the counter electrode. In laboratory language, these configurations are sometimes called “half-cells”. In most cases no reference electrode is used for such half-cells because the electrode potential of the lithium metal electrode is considered to be pinned to 0 V vs. Li/Li+. The half-cell concept is impressively simple and has proven itself for many questions. However, we will show here that half-cell experiments have their limits. In this note we will first take a closer look at the...
read more →
Blog Post
Comparing Seal Materials: When should I use aluminum or PE seals? The battery test cells in the PAT series are characterized by their high impermeability to the outside atmosphere. This increases the long-term stability of the cell chemistry and enables long-term measurements over several thousand hours. (See example here.) When designing the PAT-Cell, the number of seals was reduced as much as possible to limit potential leaks. The lid seal is, therefore, crucial for the cell's tightness. Lid seals are available in different materials. In addition to the standard seals made of PE, we also offer an aluminum version....
read more →
Blog Post
Former test setup In a previous report, we have used the ECC-Opto-Std test cell to visualize the electrochemical lithiation of a free-standing graphite electrode sandwiched with a lithium metal counter electrode as the lithium source. Sketch 1a shows the sandwich geometry of the set-up used at that time. Notably, the graphite film was placed on a holed copper current collector. This way, the ions were allowed to move in the perpendicular direction between the two opposing electrodes, and an almost uniform color change was observed during the charge/discharge cycle. Actually, although invisible, this experiment involves an inevitable potential gradient along...
read more →
Next Page »
