Structuring concepts for innovative electrodes for LIB

Summary:

Although lithium-ion batteries (LIB) have reached enormous progress over the last years, a further increase of energy density and a reduction of costs are demanded to promote acceptance for substantial applications like electric vehicles. Based on the choice of adequate active materials, an approach to effectively realize high energy electrodes and save costs at the same time is to apply very high coating thicknesses. This strategy, however, causes reduced processability and rate capability of the corresponding electrodes.

By structuring the electrodes, these drawbacks can be mitigated [1-7]. The structuring concepts mostly aim at a custom-tailored arrangement of the effective ionic path length throughout the electrode composite. Structuring often causes a partial loss of the energy density gained by thick coatings as well as additional production costs due to additional process steps. On the other hand, they can enable very large improvements in processability and rate capability. In this contribution, different structuring concepts like graded arrangement of active materials, a locally customized passive material structure and perforation are described. The peculiarities of the respective processes are explained and the advantages and disadvantages are compared.