Lithium-ion battery production is undergoing significant growth as new technologies make higher energy densities viable. As new designs come online, new failure modes can cause elevated scrap rates, unstable yields, and delayed qualification timelines. Identifying these failures early is a critical part in ensuring the stability of the process.
One common source of failure modes is anode degradation, which directly affects capacity retention, impedance growth, and device safety. Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) can rapidly diagnose forms of anode degradation by detecting both light elements like lithium, hydrogen, carbon and sodium and transition metals such as nickel, manganese, cobalt, aluminium and copper, with true 2D and 3D depth profiling, and at higher speeds than other analytic methods such as x-ray fluorescence and scanning electron microscopy.
The J200 LIBS has been successfully used for analysing degradation in graphite anodes, identifying effects such as surface and subsurface Li accumulation, cathode-derived metal cross-contamination with spatial fractionation patterns, separator coating breakdown, binder migration gradients, and indications of electrode delamination. Detecting these issues allows manufacturers to adjust their manufacturing and quality assurance techniques to improve long term manufacturing yields and shorten development cycles for later generation electrodes.
If you’d like to know more about laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, please contact us on +612 9979 7646 or fill out the contact form below.
