Projects

Started

Basic and strategic applied research

PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Metallurgy and Materials)

Not Cross-cutting

Dominic Spencer-Jolly
University of Birmingham

Standard

EPSRC

01 October 2025

01 April 2027

18 months

£256,688

Unknown

West Midlands

NC : Physical Sciences

Dominic Spencer-Jolly, University of Birmingham

Batteries have changed the way in which we store and consume energy, and promise to be one of the most important technologies in the race to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. In recent years, the mass-adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has led to unprecedented demand for batteries. However, accompanying this is increased concern about the cost, lifetime, and performance of these batteries, as well as the sustainability of the materials that go in to them, and their recyclability at end-of-life. It is therefore important to develop new, high-performance, long-lifetime, and sustainable battery materials, as well as new processing methods that are low-cost and environmentally-friendly. Producing battery materials by microfluidic synthesis is a promising but relatively unexplored area of research. Fluids flowing through microchannels behave very differently to bulk fluids, and these unique properties can be harnessed to synthesise nanoparticles in a low-cost, green and continuous process, with unrivalled control over particle morphology and structure. As a result, microfluidics is already used in the chemicals industry to produce functional nanoparticles, and in the pharmaceutical industry to produce drug particles with lipid- or polymer-coated surfaces. This project will use microfluidics to synthesise next-generation battery cathodes. The cathode is one of the most important materials within a battery, accounting for approximately half of the cost of each cell, and determining its energy density and cycling performance. An exciting, next-generation class of cathode materials, termed lithium-rich cathodes, promises to significantly increase the amount of energy that batteries can store. However, they also experience much more severe degradation than conventional lithium-ion cathodes, which limits battery lifetime and performance, and is a barrier to their commercialisation. The aim of this project is to use the unique advantages of microfluidic flow synthesis to produce lithium-rich cathode particles with tailored nanostructures. These nanostructures will make the cathode particles less susceptible to degradation, and so improve battery performance and lifetime. The objectives of the project are to produce three different kinds of nanostructured particles: 1) single crystal particles, 2) particles with a lithium-rich core and a conventional cathode shell, and 3) metal oxide-coated particles. In each case, optimisation of the microfluidic synthesis conditions will be informed by characterisation of the products through cutting-edge techniques including X-ray diffraction and spectroscopy, advanced imaging, and particle size analysis. Finally, the performance of nanostructured lithium-rich cathode materials will be assessed by testing in battery cells. This ambitious programme of research will be carried out in collaboration with the Faraday Institution’s next generation lithium-ion cathode materials project, CATMAT. CATMAT are the globalleaders in understanding, synthesising, and scaling-up production of lithium-rich cathodes. This collaboration opportunity will place myself and the PDRA at the heart of the UK’s battery research community, providing the opportunity to access world-leading characterisation equipment and modelling support, and to collaborate to achieve a depth of understanding and quality of research output which would not otherwise be possible at this early stage in my academic career. We expect to find that tailored lithium rich-cathodes made using microfluidics will outperform those made by batch-processing methods. This finding has the potential to be highly impactful and drive adoption of microfluidic synthesis in industry, particularly as there are also strong economic and environmental incentives to use continuous flow techniques for cathode synthesis

14/01/26