Visualisation study sheds light on energy storage

“Iron fluoride has the potential to triple the amount of energy a conventional lithium-ion battery can store,” said Song Jin, a UW-Madison professor of chemistry and Wisconsin Energy Institute affiliate. “However, we have yet to tap its true potential.”

Graduate student Linsen Li worked with Jin and others to perform experiments with a transmission X-ray microscope at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven. There, they collected chemical maps from actual coin cell batteries filled with iron fluoride during battery cycling to determine how well they perform. The results are published in Nature Communications.

“In the past, we weren’t able to truly understand what is happening to iron fluoride during battery reactions because other battery components were getting in the way of getting a precise image,” Li said in a statement.

By accounting for the background signals that would otherwise confuse the image, Li was able to visualise and measure, at the nanoscale, the chemical changes iron fluoride undergoes to store and discharge energy.