SBIR Phase II: Electrochemical Acoustic Tools for the Analysis of Batteries

该项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是帮助电池超越大众市场电动汽车、可再生能源发电和下一代消费电子设备的质量、性能和安全要求。对高性能电池的需求正在加速增长，随着电池在能量密度、尺寸和产量方面的增长，质量问题也将持续存在。除非这些问题得到解决，否则它们将继续对这些重要技术的性能、安全性和采用产生重大影响。挑战在于，在研发实验室之外，该行业所依赖的基本数据与电池最初发明时基本相同：电压、电流和温度。因此，在商业规模上，只有一小部分电池以有意义的方式进行了检查，其方法只能提供有关物理状况的间接信息。该项目第二阶段的重点是开发一个用于生产级电池检测的新平台，该平台可以直接探测电池的物理状况，并具有高测试吞吐量。这可以在制造环境中做出更好的决策，可以降低系统成本，增加容量和使用寿命，并加速有前途的新材料的规模。这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目旨在解决电池生产环境中物理检测模式的需求，该模式能够高保真地筛选每个电池。目前，生产级环境中的检查仅限于电气测量和x射线。电学方法只能提供关于物理状况的间接和电池平均信息，x射线实际上无法检测电池内电解质的分布和固体电解质间相（SEI）层的形成（这两者都强烈影响电池的长期可靠性、性能和安全性）。第二阶段的项目旨在开发一个平台，利用基于声音的方法来检测生产环境中的电池。这将涉及开发一个规模化、自动化的硬件系统，以及用于处理和分析声学信号的软件和计算方法。第二阶段的项目还将包括各种测试和验证工作，以评估声学分析的能力，从而直接确定电池的性能质量和可靠性，并提高电池和模块的性能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be in helping batteries exceed the quality, performance, and safety demands of mass-market electric vehicles, renewable energy generation, and next-generation consumer electronic devices. The need for high-performance batteries is accelerating, and as batteries grow in energy density, size, and production volumes, so will the issues that persist with quality. Unless these issues are addressed, they will continue to have major implications for the performance, safety, and adoption of these important technologies. The challenge is that outside of R&D labs, the industry relies on essentially the same basic data as when batteries were first invented: voltage, current, and temperature. As a result, at commercial scales, only a small percentage of batteries are inspected in a meaningful way, with methods that only provide indirect information about physical condition. This Phase 2 project is focused on developing a new platform for production-level battery inspection that directly probes the physical condition of batteries with a high testing throughput. This could lead to better decisions in manufacturing environments and could decrease system costs, increase capacity and operational lifetime, and accelerate the scale-up of promising new materials.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project addresses the need for a physical mode of inspection in battery production environments that is capable of screening every cell with high fidelity. Currently, inspection in production-level environments are limited to electrical measurements and X-rays. Electrical methods provide only indirect and cell-averaged information about physical condition, and X-rays are not practically able to detect the distribution of electrolyte within batteries nor the formation of the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer (both of which strongly affect long-term reliability, performance, and safety of batteries). This Phase 2 project aims to develop a platform that utilizes sound-based methods to inspect batteries in production-environments. This will involve developing a scaled, automated hardware system as well as software and computational methods for processing and analyzing the acoustic signals. The Phase 2 project will also include various testing and validation efforts to assess the ability of acoustic analysis to both directly determine the performance quality and reliability of cells beyond beginning of life capacity and resistance, as well as to improve the performance of strings of cells and modules.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.