Nanoscale characterization of Li metal batteries enabled by cryogenic lift-out
Developing methods for electron-transparent specimens without inducing artifacts has become significantly important for the high-resolution characterization of battery materials. During this webinar, we introduced our recent approach (cryogenic-lift-out) to generate lamellae with cryogenic ion microscopy and talked about the effects of xenon ion beam on lithium metal batteries through the usage of cryogenic (S)TEM. We also showed the capability of the Metro direct detection counting camera to pull out the diffraction information that helps to identify the ion beam effect.
Determining lithium content by the composition by difference method
Lithium (Li)-ion batteries have been adopted for a wide range of energy storage applications due to their outstanding energy density and low mass compared to other technologies. However, there remains considerable scope for energy capacity and efficiency improvements by optimizing devices and materials used in their construction. In particular, microstructural and compositional analysis has proven challenging at the micro- and nano-scales with structure evolution and degradation mechanisms due to lack of understooding at these length scales.