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... read more →
Oct
20
Apr
16
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... read more →
Sep
11
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... read more →
Sep
04
In our last application note we took a closer look at the cathode "half-cell" of the lithium-ion battery, which in our case was NCM against lithium metal. It turned out, that the lithium metal electrode is under some conditions the bottleneck of charge transfer, especially at the vertex points of... read more →
Jun
04
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... read more →
May
04
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... read more →
Feb
24
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.... read more →
Mar
05
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... read more →
Dec
18
The anode material in almost all of today’s secondary lithium-ion batteries is graphite. In order to boost the energy density, we would love to replace the graphite by lithium metal. Many people work on this goal. Unfortunately, the lithium metal anode tends to form dendrites during electrochemical plating, eventually... read more →
Oct
12
In a previous application note named “1001 reasons for using a reference electrode” we tried to convince you of the advantages of three-electrode cells with reference electrode over so-called half cells with lithium metal counter electrode. We claimed: “The large overvoltage at the lithium metal CE, the chemical reactivity of... read more →