{"id":108,"date":"2014-01-22T18:40:35","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T18:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/?p=108"},"modified":"2014-01-22T18:41:36","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T18:41:36","slug":"exciting-results-from-inside-batteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/?p=108","title":{"rendered":"Exciting results from inside batteries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.55.23-PM.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-110\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2014-01-22 at 12.55.23 PM\" src=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.55.23-PM-944x1024.png\" width=\"584\" height=\"633\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.55.23-PM-944x1024.png 944w, http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.55.23-PM-276x300.png 276w, http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.55.23-PM.png 1238w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px\" \/><\/a><strong>We\u00a0just had a paper published\u00a0<\/strong>in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/pubs.rsc.org\/en\/content\/articlelanding\/2014\/ta\/c3ta15169g#!divAbstract\" target=\"_blank\">The Journal of Materials Chemistry A<\/a>\u00a0about some research done at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/brookhavenlab.tumblr.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Brookhaven National Lab<\/a>. It\u2019s cool and new because it uses\u00a0<strong>extremely high-power X-rays<\/strong>\u00a0that can penetrate thick materials, even metals. The technique was developed to find points of strain inside high-performance materials like turbine blades.\u00a0<strong>We use it to do the same thing, but inside batteries.<\/strong>\u00a0And not just small batteries, but very thick ones, like D-cell batteries, which are an inch or two across.<\/p>\n<p>Inside the battery, the X-rays bounce off crystal faces of the materials, and because of that you can know things about how far apart the atoms are. A D-cell has zinc at its center (anode) and manganese dioxide around its outside (cathode).\u00a0<strong>The lines in the image above are like fingerprints of these materials.<\/strong>\u00a0(And the numbers like (002) refer to the crystal faces themselves.)<\/p>\n<p>Another cool thing about this technique is that it is very fast. You can scan the battery in a few minutes.\u00a0<strong>This means that as it\u2019s charging and discharging you can watch the materials changing in real time, inside the sealed battery.<\/strong>\u00a0Basically this is what we do in the paper, shown below, seeing some things no one has ever been able to see before (except by cracking a battery open after cycling it, which can sometimes be effective, but not always).\u00a0<strong>Brookhaven<\/strong>\u00a0(on Long Island, in New York) is one of the only places in the world you can do this.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.56.20-PM.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-109\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2014-01-22 at 12.56.20 PM\" src=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.56.20-PM-1024x800.png\" width=\"584\" height=\"456\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.56.20-PM-1024x800.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.56.20-PM-300x234.png 300w, http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.56.20-PM-383x300.png 383w, http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-Shot-2014-01-22-at-12.56.20-PM.png 1650w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We\u00a0just had a paper published\u00a0in\u00a0The Journal of Materials Chemistry A\u00a0about some research done at\u00a0Brookhaven National Lab. It\u2019s cool and new because it uses\u00a0extremely high-power X-rays\u00a0that can penetrate thick materials, even metals. The technique was developed to find points of strain &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/?p=108\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7],"tags":[12,4,17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}