High pressure effects of ball milling give boost to battery manufacturing

This is the claim of scientists at Birmingham University who found that routine ball milling can cause high pressure effects on battery materials in minutes, providing an additional variable in the process of synthesising battery materials.

The research - part of the Faraday Institution funded CATMAT project - led by Dr Laura Driscoll, Dr Elizabeth Driscoll and Professor Peter Slater at Birmingham University is published in RSC Energy Environmental Science.

According to Birmingham University, the use of ball milling has been an area of growth in the lithium-ion battery space to make next generation materials. The process is simple and consists of milling powder compounds with small balls that mix and make the particles smaller, creating high-capacity electrode materials and leading to better performing batteries.

Previous studies led experts to believe that the synthesis of these materials was caused by localised heating generated in the milling process. Now, researchers have found that dynamic impacts from the milling balls colliding with the battery materials create a pressure effect which plays an important role in causing the changes.