MEET Research Teams Wins Batteries 2021 Best Paper Award

Award for Research on Pre-Lithiation Processes

MEET scientists Florian Holtstiege, Peer Bärmann, Roman Nölle, Prof. Dr Martin Winter and Dr Tobias Placke were awarded first prize in the Batteries 2021 Best Paper Awards. Their review article “Pre-Lithiation Strategies for Rechargeable Energy Storage Technologies: Concepts, Promises and Challenges” provides a comprehensive overview of the different concepts for pre-lithiation and discusses their advantages and challenges.

Potential for Pre-Lithiation in Commercial Battery Cell Production

Grapic Pre-Lithiation
© MDPI

Pre-lithiation is considered a highly appealing technique to compensate for active lithium losses and, therefore, to increase the practical energy density and performance of battery cells. In the award-winning review article, the authors list, among other things, the variety of techniques and methods to perform pre-lithiation. In addition to lithium-ion technology, the scientists show possible applications for post-lithium-ion battery technologies such as sulphur or oxygen (air) batteries. Pre-lithiation has the potential to be used in a commercial process of battery cell production. In particular, for the broad commercial breakthrough of high-capacity anode active materials such as silicon or silicon oxide, which are currently rarely used commercially and only applied in minor amounts (up to ≈ 8 wt.%) in lithium ion batteries, pre-lithiation will be mandatory to compensate the high active lithium losses in the first charge-discharge cycles.

MEET Research on Pre-Lithiation

Novel or improved methods for pre-lithiation of silicon-based anode materials are being developed in the research area “Materials” at MEET Battery Research Center of the University of Münster. The research of the awarded review article by Florian Holtstiege, Peer Bärmann, Roman Nölle, Prof. Dr Martin Winter and Dr Tobias Placke is embedded in “BenchBatt”, a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and in “Go3”, a project funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.