| Popis: |
Lithium Ion Batteries (LIBs) are widely used in research, industry and households, especially equipped in autonomous systems, such as mobile robots in air, land, or sea. More importantly, some of the environments are filled with nuclear radiation and with high temperature. The performance of LIBs in these environments are crucial to sustained operations of these systems. Unfortunately, how an LIB may degrade the operation of such systems has not been seriously studied in the field. Researches on LIBs material, performance, sustainability, etc. have been done through recent decades. Many kinds of cathode, electrolyte and anode material have been discovered and several configurations, like coin cells, cylinder cells, and prismatic cells have been developed for different operating conditions. The concern is still on the performance degradation and reliability when operating in radiation and high temperature environments such as in outer space exploration, to power robots in hot cell, and equipment for performing rescue or sampling missions at post-nuclear accidents. In this study, we designed an in situ methodology to monitor LIBs performance degradation when operating (cycling) under gamma radiation with a post-accident dose rate (~30krad/h), in terms of capacity fade and impedance rise. Coin cells were assembled using commercial cathode material and electrolyte, with Li as reference electrode. An ex-situ irradiation -testing protocol was also adopted in this study, as we were interested in investigating separate radiation effects on individual battery components. Additionally, the effect of radiation on battery materials may be different at various temperature environment, for example, in space or in a nuclear accident field. We have conducted battery performance under irradiation while heating (80 °C) or cooling (-40 °C). Ex situ studies, including cathode material X-ray diffraction (XRD), and characterizations with Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV-vis) spectroscopy and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) will also be discussed. |
