A new approach to making chemically complex materials could make it easier to manufacture new chemistries such as batteries and semiconductors, researchers report.
The researchers’ new recipe uses unconventional raw materials to produce battery materials with fewer impurities, reducing costly purification steps and improving economics.
“Over the past 20 years, many battery materials with improved capacity, charging speed, and stability have been computer-designed, but none have made it to market,” said Wenhao Sun, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan. says Mr.Corresponding author of the study natural synthesis.
“Simple materials are often a good starting point, but when you add a small amount of Compound A and a small amount of Compound B, the magic happens and dramatically increases capacity and charging speed. Complex materials are often difficult to manufacture at scale with high purity.
Battery materials are typically made by mixing several different oxide powders and baking them in an oven. However, these powders do not all react at the same time, but in sequence. The first two components that react are usually the ones that release the most energy during the reaction. The first reaction produces an intermediate compound that reacts with the remaining powder and so on until it can no longer react.
If the chemical bonds in the intermediate compound are difficult to break, it may not react completely with other components. If not completely reacted, the intermediate remains as an undesirable impurity in the final material.
“We designed a strategy to more reliably produce impurity-free materials,” said Jiadong, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science Engineering and Scientific Computing at the University of Michigan. Chen said. “The trick is that he uses only two components at a time and intentionally creates unstable intermediates that react completely with the remaining components.”
To test this strategy, Sun’s team ran 224 different recipes to create 35 known materials, including elements used in today’s batteries and the next generation of “beyond lithium” batteries. I designed it.
The researchers then partnered with Samsung Semiconductor’s Advanced Materials Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to test whether their recipes had fewer impurities in these 35 ingredients than traditional recipes. Samsung’s automated robotics laboratory can synthesize up to 24 different battery materials every 72 hours.
A robotic arm handles the material and operates laboratory equipment that evaluates the purity of the resulting material. Meanwhile, computers automatically record the results of each experiment, creating a database that researchers can use to determine which recipes are most effective.
“Using an automated lab, we can test a wide range of hypotheses about different battery chemistries,” Chen says.
Experiments confirmed that new recipes containing ingredients designed to be unstable tended to produce cleaner products. The new recipe increased the purity of the ingredients by up to 80%, and six of the targeted ingredients could only be produced with the new recipe.
The blueprint for a robotic laboratory is detailed in the team’s report, which Sun hopes will enable more chemistry labs to implement robotic labs for both science and materials manufacturing. ing.
“Improving materials manufacturing strategies requires more data, not only from successful recipes but also from unsuccessful recipes. More robotics labs will help generate the necessary data.” says Sun.
These labs are within reach of most research institutions and have the potential to significantly speed up materials development, the researchers say.
“The initial cost of the robotic equipment is approximately $120,000, which is not as high as you might think. However, the gains in throughput, reliability, and data management are invaluable,” said study co-author and director of Samsung Advanced Materials. said Yan-Eric Wang, the institute’s principal engineer and project manager.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Science Program funded this research.
Source: Derek Smith, University of Michigan
