Better, Safer Batteries
Both consumers and manufacturers want better batteries—batteries that work more efficiently, last longer and are safer to use. To get there, battery professionals need to see what’s taking place inside: insight into the ways that these materials interact with one another inside can make a world of difference. However, many of those interactions take place at the nanoscale-level and have been previously obscured.
That’s where Baylor researcher Jonathan Larson is changing the game. His groundbreaking work applies spectroscopic techniques to provide unprecedented insights at the nanoscale level: one-one-billionth of a meter. That information yields deeper understanding of the interactions taking place with in the battery, and that understanding can be applied to building better and safer batteries. Before Larson’s work, battery researchers typically had to resort to opening cells to see what was taking place.
“Batteries are engineered with carefully designed bulk materials, even down to microscale precision, yet key performance limitations often arise from hidden interfacial processes that occur at the nanoscale – leading to an immense need for new methods that can sense such processes,” Larson said.
Larson, an interdisciplinary scientist in Baylor’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been at the forefront of groundbreaking techniques to understand these interactions.
“The common thread I pursue is a better understanding of regions within a battery where two different materials adjoin, called interfaces,” Larson said. “These interfaces are critically important to the operation and safety of state-of-the-art Li-ion batteries, as well as to nanoscale interfacial processes key to enabling new battery chemistries and technologies that could bring step changes in battery performance, sustainability and safety.”
To achieve that, Larson has applied a new method called infrared nanospectroscopy (nano-FTIR) to view the interface interactions without destroying the battery itself. In addition, this process allows researchers to view these interactions inside the battery instead of out—as they are used by consumers.
In coming to Baylor in 2023, Larson brought his innovative approach to the University. Leaders in higher education, industry and government are being introduced to these new capabilities he has helped pioneer. In April, he appeared before the world’s largest online gathering of battery professionals to present his work.
At Baylor, Larson continues to combine techniques from this diversity of fields to pursue answers to basic science questions that could lead to the development of better batteries.“I find that some of the most interesting problems from a basic science perspective, like batteries, reside in the blurred boundaries between disciplines and rather than isolating from one another or competing with each other, we should acknowledge individual strengths and weaknesses and join together in efforts, as the sum of our parts is better than those separated,” he said.