Understanding Coupled Behaviors of Energy Storage Beyond Energy and Power

The first 200 years of engineering and understanding electrochemical energy storage has been explicitly focused on understanding the fundamental limitations of energy density and power density and optimizing these metrics for a given application. In the last decade, capital cost, operating cost, cycle life and calendar life have become equally important metrics. But while energy and power studies have roots in fundamental chemistry and physics, the latter metrics were typically relegated to manufacturing and warranty concerns.

Thus, while the Ragone diagram elegantly illustrates for various geometries of a given chemistry, and for various chemistries of a given geometry, the fundamental behavior between energy and power, we do not yet have a fundamental understanding of:

1. Do batteries have to fail? and if so
2. What is the relationship between operating parameters and failure?

There has been significant work which addresses aspects of these questions for different systems and chemistries, and in this Batteries GRC we look forward to hosting a range of researchers and approaches that will hopefully help the field more explicitly understand the fundamental relationships between battery failure, battery cost, energy density, and power density.