The ALBA's Battery Lab pretends to fulfill the necessities of the users and scientific community for a facility dedicated to batteries in the synchrotron. The lab includes all the necessary equipment to prepare and evaluate batteries from a given active material to its electrochemical characterization. Providing the users and collaborators for a support platform conveniently close to the multiple beamlines that perform operando studies on Batteries.
Equipment
Besides the common chemistry equipment (fumehoods, balances, heating plates, ultrasonic bath…), the Battery Lab possesses a complete lab-scale pilot plant to prepare, assemble and characterize coin, pouch and other types of batteries.
Preparation of electrodes
The lab possesses a full line of equipment devoted to the preparation of electrodes for battery testing experiments by long term users or collaborators. A vacuum mixer can prepare the slurry to be casted and dried on a foil with the tape caster. The casted electrodes can then be compressed by a calendering machine and cut into the right size for the desirable cell. All the battery material can be dried in the vacuum oven and prepared for their later assembling.
Assemble
A two chamber Argon Glovebox is available in the lab to mount coin, pouch and other types of cells in an inert atmosphere. With this purpose the Glovebox is fully equipped with balances, crimping tools and a vacuum pouch cell sealer.
Next, a video about how to prepare coin cells.
Electrochemistry characterization
Once assembled, the batteries can be cycled with two different Biologic® potentiostats of 2 and 16 channels in the same lab. Having the option of a low current channel that can reach (1 nA) in the 2 channel potentiostat. This equipment allows to work in parallel with the beamline and pre-cycle cells before and during the beamtime, optimizing this way the experiments.
