Improving electrolyte transport inside the Li-ion porous electrodes using microchannels

Effects of using microchannels on the electrolyte transport inside the positive and negative electrodes have been investigated in this paper. A two-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) simulation was carried out and a two-phase intermolecular potential model was utilized to investigate the microscopic behavior of the electrolyte flow in the porous electrodes. It was found that embedding microchannels inside the electrodes significantly improves the electrolyte transport inside both positive and negative electrodes. Furthermore, there is an optimum number of microchannels after which increasing the number of microchannels has no positive effect on the electrolyte transport inside the electrodes. Finally, the number of microchannels in the anode should be less than the number of the microchannels in the cathode in order to uniform electrolyte transport inside the both negative and positive electrodes.