Award: HI ERN doctoral student receives poster prize
Janik Lüchtefeld has been working on his doctorate at HI ERN since October 2020. He received the award at the GDCh Electrochemistry conference in October 2022.
HI ERN PhD student Janik Lüchtefeld has been awarded the Wiley Poster Award for his poster presentation. He received the award during the Electrochemistry conference of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) in October 2022.
The poster was titled "In-situ Mass Spectrometry of LIB Cathode Dissolution in water-enriched Electrolyte. Monitoring of transient dissolution processes". Here he presented a general scheme for dissolution of cathode material and the accompanying experimental setup, as well as two key results of his PhD research at HI ERN:
The dissolution of thin film NCM111 in normal battery electrolytes and electrolytes containing 1000 ppm water, and the dissolution of the same material in contaminated electrolytes when the LiPF6 conducting salt is replaced with LiTFSI. In essence, it can be stated that water fundamentally changes the dissolution behavior. This new dissolution process results from degradation products of the reaction of water with LiPF6. However, this can only be observed with the flow cell/ICP-MS method developed at HI ERN. This result may aid in the research of new cathode materials and help design next generation, durable batteries.
Janik Lüchtefeld studied chemistry and biotechnology at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and has been working on his doctorate at HI ERN in the Non-aqueous Electrochemistry research group since completing his master's degree in 2020. Here he is investigating the dissolution behavior of cathode materials of lithium-ion batteries using the flow cell/ICP-MS method developed by institute director Prof. Dr. Karl Mayrhofer and the influence of different electrolyte compositions on it.
This enables a fundamental insight into battery processes and provides new means of research for high performance battery materials.