Engineering topics

Ferris, Kim F.

Publications and source records attributed to Ferris, Kim F..

3 records

DOE OSTI2016

Investigating the Effects of Anisotropic Mass Transport on Dendrite Growth in High Energy Density Lithium Batteries

Dendrite formation on the electrode surface of high energy density lithium (Li) batteries causes safety problems and limits their applications. Suppressing dendrite growth could significantly improve Li battery performance. Dendrite growth and morphology is a function of the mixing in the electrolyte near the anode interface. Most research into dendrites in batteries focuses on dendrite formation in isotropic electrolytes (i.e., electrolytes with isotropic diffusion coefficient). In this work, an anisotropic diffusion reaction model is developed to study the anisotropic mixing effect on dendrite growth in Li batteries. The model uses a Lagrangian particle-based method to model dendrite growth in an anisotropic electrolyte solution. The model is verified by comparing the numerical simulation results with analytical solutions, and its accuracy is shown to be better than previous particle-based anisotropic diffusion models. Several parametric studies of dendrite growth in an anisotropic electrolyte are performed and the results demonstrate the effects of anisotropic transport on dendrite growth and morphology, and show the possible advantages of anisotropic electrolytes for dendrite suppression.

SPH, high energy density lithium batteries, precip↗

DOE OSTI2013

Computational Modeling of Transport Limitations in Li-Air Batteries

In this paper we investigate transport limitations in the electrodes of lithium-air batteries through computational modeling. We use meso-scale models to consider the effects of dendrites on the current and potential at the anode surface, and to investigate the effects of reaction and transport parameters on the formation of precipitates in the cathode. The formation of dendrites on the anode surface during cycling reduces the transport of ions and can lead to short circuits in the cell. Growth of precipitates in the cathode reduces the specific capacity of the cell due to surface passivation and pore clogging. Both of these degradation mechanisms depend on meso-scale phenomena, such as the pore-scale reactive transport in the cathode. To understand the effects of the meso-scale transport and precipitation on the performance and lifetime of Li-air batteries, meso-scale modeling is needed that is able to resolve the electrodes and their microstructures.

Li-Air Batteries, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics,↗

DOE OSTI2011

Dimension reduction method for ODE fluid models

We develop a dimension reduction method for large size ODE systems obtained from a dis- cretization of partial differential equations of viscous fluid flow of nearly constant density. The method is also applicable to other large size classical particle systems with negligibly small variations of concentration. We propose a new computational closure for mesoscale balance equations based on numerical iterative deconvolution. To illustrate the computa- tional advantages of the proposed reduction method we use it to solve a system of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic ODEs describing Poiseuille flows driven by uniform and periodic (in space) body forces. For the Poiseuille flow driven by the uniform force the coarse solution was obtained with the zero-order deconvolution. For the flow driven by the periodic body force, the first-order deconvolution was necessary to obtain a sufficiently accurate solution.

dimension reduction↗