Liquid Li-ion Electrolyte Liquid Li-ion Electrolyte Optimization: Optimizing Electrolytes For Cycle Life

Optimizing Electrolytes for Cycle Life

Aionics partnered with a battery manufacturer seeking to optimize the identity and concentrations of the components in their electrolyte formulations in order to maximize battery cycle life. While the physical properties of an electrolyte formulation may be straightforward to compute from its components using physical models, the interactions with the electrodes and formation of passivation layers is a complex and chaotic process that is nearly impossible to understand from first principles. The Aionics team ingested data from around 200 unique electrolyte formulations that the manufacturer had already tested, and trained models to predict various cycle life metrics based only on the identity and concentrations of the electrolyte components. This model was then used to screen thousands of new candidate formulations; subsequent testing revealed the model was able to predict the in situ performance of an electrolyte with 10x higher accuracy than random guesswork.