Charging electric-vehicle batteries in Ithaca鈥檚 frigid winter can be tough, and freezing temperatures also decrease the driving range. Hot weather can be just as challenging, leading to decomposition of battery materials and, possibly, catastrophic failure.
For electric vehicles (EVs) to be widely accepted, safe and fast-charging lithium ion batteries need to be able to operate in extreme temperatures. But to achieve this, scientists need to understand how materials used in EVs change during temperature-related chemical reactions, a so-far elusive goal.
Now, Cornell chemists led by , Ph.D. 鈥21, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频, have developed a way to diagnose the mechanisms behind battery failure in extreme climates using electron microscopy. Their first-of-its-kind operando (鈥渙perating鈥) electrochemical transmission electron microscopy (TEM) enables them to watch chemistry in action and collect real-time movies showing what happens to energy materials during temperature changes.
The work was done in close collaboration with , assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology (A&S). Thiede鈥檚 group developed new data analysis algorithms to analyze the movies generated by the TEM. Their paper, 鈥,鈥 published May 23 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
鈥淲e now have an opportunity to investigate battery operation down to minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit), as in extremely cold Arctic climates, and catalyst activation and degradation up to 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit) as in many industrial catalysts and every car鈥檚 catalytic converter,鈥 Yang said.
The researchers used a three-electrode electrochemical circuit and a two-electrode heating and cooling circuit to achieve quantitative electrochemistry with access to this full temperature range.
Yang鈥檚 group has been working on the TEM instrument development for three years, in collaboration with industry partner Protochips Inc. in North Carolina. His work advances development of electrochemical methods to study energy materials for powering safer and faster-charging lithium batteries, as well as for splitting water for green hydrogen production.
鈥淲e鈥檝e also been designing nanocatalysts for carbon emissions reduction to sustainable liquid fuels, efforts which help address the global problem of climate change,鈥 said Yang. That project is being co-led by co-authors Sungin Kim, a Korean Sejong Science Fellow, and Valentin Briega-Martos, both chemistry postdoctoral researchers.
Thiede鈥檚 research originally focused on developing new machine-learning and artificial-intelligence algorithms for analyzing cryogenic electron microscopy images of protein structures.
鈥淭hen I realized that our group鈥檚 algorithms are also incredibly helpful in the automated analysis of gigabyte-to-terabyte microscopic images and movies from the Yang group,鈥 Thiede said. 鈥淭he data the Yang group collects is every computational scientist鈥檚 dream. It allows us to see new scientific phenomena but is complicated enough that analyzing it requires new algorithms, which makes us feel the power of the joint experiment-theory approach.鈥
Other co-authors include Kwanghwi Je, a who leads the Thiede group鈥檚 AI and machine-learning efforts for energy materials; Yafet Negash 鈥27; chemistry postdoctoral researchers Shikai Liu and Juhyung Choi; chemistry first-year Ph.D. students Zhijing (Zora) Zhang, Rafael Guzman-Soriano, Wenqi Li and Jiahong Jiang; and Yimo Han, Ph.D. 鈥17, an assistant professor at Rice University.
This work was conducted at the Platform for the Accelerated Realization, Analysis, and Discovery of Interface Materials (PARADIM), led by Steven Zeltmann, an National Science Foundation-supported PARADIM scientist. Other contributors include John Grazul and Philip Carubia, staff scientists at the Cornell Center for Materials Research.
Yang鈥檚 team received support from a 2025 and the 2025 . Thiede鈥檚 group received support from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Institute and the .
Linda B. Glaser is news and media relations manager for the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频.
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