Paper on stress-induced nonuniform intercalation in LiFePO4

Kaiqi has published a paper on modeling stress-induced non-uniform intercalation behavior in LiFePO4 in Journal of Materials Chemistry A (link). The simulation results exhibit very good agreement with a previous operando scanning transmission X-ray microscopy study and reveals that the coherency stress generated by the misfit strain between the Li-rich and Li-poor phases of the system destabilizes the lithium (de)intercalation front and leads to inferior electrode performance. It also shows that antisite defects promote the interface instability by allowing Li to move more freely along the [100] direction in the diffusion-limited regime. This draws an interesting contrast to our previous finding (published in npj Computational Materials) that antisite defects can benefit intercalation kinetics in the surface-reaction-limited regime. It paints a more complex picture of the defect effect and shows it is dependent on the phase transition mode. Here’s a news story on this work:  https://news.rice.edu/2020/01/14/not-so-fast-some-batteries-can-be-pushed-too-far/