The new climate bill signed by President Biden demands better and cleaner energy. This includes safe and long-lasting batteries for energy storage. Prehit Patel an Indian researcher is helping in achieving this goal.
Prehit Patel is a battery researcher working on Li-ion and Li-metal batteries for grid storage, electric vehicles (EV), and aviation. His primary focus is increasing energy density and fast charging of batteries. He has designed a new type of electrode microstructure with electrolyte channels which can reduce the risk of lithium plating by fifty percent. Lithium plating is extremely dangerous for the batteries which can lead to fires or even exploding batteries.
Prehit has previously worked at major U.S. Department of Energy Laboratories like Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
While he was working at the National Renewable Energy Lab, he helped developing open-source battery Microstructure Analysis Toolbox (MATBOX). Battery microstructure plays crucial role in the safety of lithium-ion batteries. The Microstructure Analysis Toolbox helps analyze battery electrodes to predict battery performance and optimize electrode microstructure architecture to build safer batteries. This toolbox developed by NREL provides built in functionality of meshing, numerical generation, segmentation, and characterization of microstructure materials. This is the first ever built open-source toolbox which can directly analysis the electrode microstructure for safer batteries.
MATBOX is developed in MATLAB and it’s easy to install. This toolbox helps calculate key parameters of the battery electrodes like porosity, tortuosity, active material fraction etc. which are hard to determine experimentally. The key feature of MATBOX is its complex graphic user face which Prehit developed. MATBOX can also generate battery microstructure as per user requirements. Since this toolbox is open source, it comes at zero cost and help saves thousands of dollars for researcher trying to access paid software and toolboxes. In recent times MATBOX has gained extreme popularity in the field of battery research.
MATBOX is currently used all over the world by well know institutes. As if now through verified sources this toolbox is used at National Renewable Energy Lab, Sandia National Laboratories,University College London, University of Alabama in Huntsville, University of Connecticut, University of Chicago,Imperial College London,Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, General Motors, and Cuberg Inc.
The toolbox was published in Software X journal and it can be downloaded for free from following link – https://www.nrel.gov/transportation/matbox.html.
One of the other journal articles he co-authored was “A Minimal Information Set To Enable Verifiable Theoretical Battery Research”. This article provides detail understanding of how to model lithium-ion batteries. This article combines the research of over 29 authors from all over the world. The article gained so much attention in the field of battery research that the article was awarded most read of the month journal article by ACS Energy Letters. This article stormed twitter with surprised. Battery researchers from universities and research institutions came together to discuss the use of this journal article. The article became so popular in short time that it was cited by universities like University of Oxford, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, MIT, etc. This research article provides key theoretically and experimentally calculated chemical and microstructure properties of battery which plays important role in developing battery models.
