Battery Technology

Lithium-Metal and Lithium-Ion-Batteries (LIB)

Research Area Manager: Dr. rer.nat. Norbert Wagner

Schematic of a lithium-air battery

Mobile energy storage devices form the basis not only for future oriented drive systems such as vehicles with hybrid drive and all electrically driven vehicles but also hydrogen storage and fuel cell technologies. The key technology to realize a broad electro mobility is an efficient, affordable and customer friendly battery.

Battery systems like lithium-sulfur and lithium-air have a great potential to reach the highest capacity and energy density values.  However, these systems suffer from many aspects which need to be understood and improved through fundamental research. Safety and reliability of the high energy and high capacity batteries are very important for the industrial applications and therefore, they should be improved by using inherently safe materials and status diagnoses.

Fields of Activity

Development of lithium-sulfur and lithium-air batteries having new nano- and microstructural electrodes

• Investigation of degradation processes and development of strategies to prevent them
• Development of electrodes with increased safety and cheaper manufacturing processes
• Determination of status of battery (State of charge: SOC, State of health: SOH) for battery cells and systems with in-situ diagnostics and frequency analysis
• Multi-scale-modelling und simulation of battery processes with lifetime prediction
• Cyclization and component design

Coating Technologies

Dry powder spraying facility
Reactive rolling and mixing facility
Suspension spraying facility
Vacuum plasma spraying (VPS) facility

Testing Facilities

For the investigation and development of the batteries, the following measurement devices are available:

Test stations for batteries in the mW to kW range with climate chambers and electrochemical impedance spectrometer (EIS)
Test station for rotating disc ring electrode
In-situ and ex-situ XRD
Raman spectroscopy
FTIR-spectroscopy Vertex 80v
Adiabatic Calorimeter
Test stations for half cell measurements