Hummingbird Scientific’s in-situ electrical biasing holder can be used for electrochemically cycling thin film batteries while imaging the material microstructure. Representative battery cell can be thinned using FIB processing or attached to the substrate. The sample is a representative section of the real battery cell and the data obtained is representative of the real battery performance.
For example, a thin cross-section of a battery cell can be mounted, wire-bonded, and viewed in TEM while cycling. The image shown on the left is a 10 nm graphite flake folded onto itself after one complete intercalation/deintercalation cycle.
Reference: Edward R. White, Jared J. Lodico & B. C. Regan. “Intercalation events visualized in single microcrystals of graphite,” Nature Communications (2017).
Image (left) © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
Image (bottom right) © Materials Research Society 2010