Lithium battery filling

Filling of the electrode and the separator with an electrolyte is a crucial step in the lithium ion battery manufacturing process. Incomplete filling negatively impacts electrochemical performance, cycle life, and safety of cells.

Filling a lithium-ion battery with electrolyte liquid is a core process in battery manufacturing. Better understanding of this process will reduce costs while enabling high product quality. Nonetheless, the process has not been sufficiently examined by science yet.

Electrolyte filling is a time-critical step during battery manufac-turing that also affects battery performance. The underlying physical phenomena mainly occur on the pore scale and are hard to study experimentally. Therefore, here, the lattice Boltzmann method is used to study the filling of realistic 3D lithium-ion battery cathodes.

Conclusions The electrolyte filling, as a bottleneck within the process chain of battery production, is characterized by long throughput times and a high cost of experimental studies required to ramp up stable and optimized processes.

Therefore, a trend to increase the overall size of the individual cell and to decrease the share of inactive materials is needed. The process of electrolyte filling involves the injection of electrolyte liquid into the cell, as well as the absorption of the electrolyte into the pores of the electrodes and the separator, which is known as wetting.

The electrolyte is the medium that allows ionic transport between the electrodes during charging and discharging of a cell. Electrolytes in lithium ion batteries may either be a liquid, gel or a solid.