Test printed electrodes with aqueous or gel electrolyte in our advanced 3-electrode PAT-Cell. -- PAT-Cells can now also be used for electrodes printed on non-conductive materials such as PET or paper. The general challenge of making printed electrodes usable for installation in the PAT-Core is to establish electrical contact. Normally,... read more →
Sep
01
Sep
01
In our last application note we took a closer look at the cathode "half cell" of the lithium-ion battery, which in our case was NCM against lithium metal. It turned out, that the lithium metal electrode is under some conditions the bottleneck of charge transfer, especially at the vertex points... read more →
Jun
04
New cathode and anode materials for lithium ion batteries (LiB) are often tested for their electrochemical performance using lithium metal as the counter electrode. In laboratory language, these configurations are sometimes called “half-cells”. In most cases no reference electrode is used for such half-cells because the electrode potential of the... read more →
May
04
This application note is supposed to be the first in a series dealing with the electrochemical testing of materials for lithium-ion batteries (LiB) using the PAT system from EL-CELL. More precisely, we will show you the advantages of the PAT-Cell (compared to other test cells like button, Swagelok and pouch... read more →
Feb
24
Sometimes a finger-shaped reference electrode can be better than our standard ring-shaped reference electrode. The finger reference measures the electrical potential in the middle of the stack instead of at the outer edge of the cell stack. This can help to minimize artifacts caused by inhomogeneities of the electric field.... read more →
Mar
05
Very often, Li-ion test cells are characterized in two separate experiments: first, constant current charge/discharge cycles are applied in order to learn about the direct current (dc) behavior of the battery, and, second, impedance tests are performed in order to learn about the alternating current (ac) behavior at different states... read more →
Dec
18
The anode material in almost all of today’s secondary lithium-ion batteries is graphite. In order to boost the energy density, we would love to replace the graphite by lithium metal. Many people work on this goal. Unfortunately, the lithium metal anode tends to form dendrites during electrochemical plating, eventually... read more →
Oct
12
In a previous application note named “1001 reasons for using a reference electrode” we tried to convince you of the advantages of three-electrode cells with reference electrode over so-called half cells with lithium metal counter electrode. We claimed: “The large overvoltage at the lithium metal CE, the chemical reactivity of... read more →
Jul
10
The FS-5P is a double-layered separator comprised of a 180 µm thick nonvowen PP cloth (Freudenberg FS 2226 E) and a 38 µm thick microporous UHMW-PE membrane (Lydall Solupor 5P09B). We offer PAT insulation sleeves with this FS-5P separator, either with or without a lithium reference. When built into the... read more →
Jul
07
Former test setup In a previous report, we have used the ECC-Opto-Std test cell to visualize the electrochemical lithiation of a free-standing graphite electrode sandwiched with a lithium metal counter electrode as the lithium source. Sketch 1a shows the sandwich geometry of the set-up used at that time. Notably, the... read more →