Influencing Battery Lifespan and Performance with Lithium-Ion Battery Anodes

At the Spring SciX conference at the University of Exeter, Jennifer Ferguson, an Applications Manager at Renishaw, gave a talk titled, “Understanding the Impact of the Fabrication Process on Li-ion Battery Anodes Using Chemical Analysis with the Strada® Intelligent Raman Microscope.”^1,2

As part of our coverage of this conference, Spectroscopy sat down with Ferguson to talk more about lithium-ion battery analysis and how Raman spectroscopy is being applied to characterize lithium-ion battery anodes.

What makes Raman spectroscopy particularly well suited for characterizing Li-ion battery anodes compared with other analytical techniques?

Raman spectroscopy is great for a wide range of different application areas, but especially for lithium-ion batteries. One of the key aspects that makes Raman spectroscopy so great is that these battery anodes are generally made of carbon and silicon, and that's where Raman is really ideal. Because it is able to differentiate different forms of carbon, we've seen Raman really excel. We’ve also seen it differentiate graphene well. It's really excelled in that area because it can really identify all the different properties of these different carbon materials. Within these different battery anodes, we have different forms of carbon and silicon, and what Raman can do is identify the crystalline and amorphous content of each of these different materials. They're generally made up of amorphous carbon and graphitic material, and Raman spectroscopy can allow you to see the distribution of each of those different materials around the carbon anode. And the same goes for the silicon. We can essentially use Raman and the specific amorphous silicon or crystalline silicon, and we can really determine all these different types of materials that we have present, so it really is key to this type of battery research.

Why is it important to understand the chemical distribution of materials within Li-ion battery anodes, and how does this influence battery lifespan and performance?

The distribution of materials is key to those different metrics such as lifespan and performance. Rather than essentially making up these batteries and then ultimately having a bunch of batteries and cycling them to understand if they're a good or a bad batch, understanding the chemical distribution and how that impacts each of these different metrics is essentially a proactive way of furthering battery research. Ultimately, if I had the answer to that question fully, there wouldn't be much battery research going on now, but it really is a key question that a lot of the battery manufacturers and research and development teams are trying to answer right now.

And Raman spectroscopy is really key for this because what we can do is we can essentially cycle a battery and then we can analyze how the chemicals within that battery are changing as the battery is being cycled. So, looking at all these different chemicals and how they're interacting, not only before and after, but actually during the battery is being cycled, will really give us a lot of insight into how these chemicals are changing over time. Then, the battery manufacturers can ultimately change these chemistries, and then they can essentially optimize each of these different batteries for lifespan, performance, or whatever it is they're trying to achieve with their batteries.

In the example I talked about at Spring SciX, we were looking at the mixing speed. So essentially, each of these different battery materials and the anode are mixed into a slurry. And then, we were looking at how that mixing speed impacts the particle size of all those different materials within that battery anode. What we found was that as we mixed the slurry more vigorously, there was essentially a greater breakdown in particle sizing, and that breakdown in particle sizing means that we have smaller particles around our sample, which can then ultimately increase conductivity.

But of course, that can lead to greater degradation of the battery over time. There's always kind of a tradeoff here, and it's understanding each of these different components of that formulation process to fully understand where we can optimize each of these batteries. We did that study in collaboration with the UK Battery Industrialization Centre. They were the ones making up these battery anodes for us as well. So that was really key to helping us understand what was going on. So overall, I think that understanding the chemical distribution is really key. Another study I'll quickly mention is some work my colleagues in Japan did, and they actually looked at where they undercharged, fully charged, and overcharged the battery, and they were able to use Raman and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) together to see the change in crystal orientation and the lithium coming out of the metal matrix composite (MMC) lattice as this battery was being overcharged. And that's really key to understanding when you overcharge something. What's the impact, and is that going to be reversible to your battery? As a result, there's quite a lot that we can fully understand from Raman being applied to battery research and development.

How did the use of the Strada Intelligent Raman microscope help differentiate between graphitic and amorphous carbon materials in the anodes studied?

The Strada Raman system is essentially our newest addition. We have a range of different products, and this is the newest one. And the thing that makes it really special is a lot of the automation that we've added in there. We have full automation of the system. For example, there's fast mapping, and what's really allowed me to look further into this graphitic and amorphous content more closely is we've introduced a dynamic curve fitting in the analysis options. When we look at these different amorphous and crystal and materials in Raman, we see obviously a big change in these Raman bands. By using this dynamic curve fitting, I was really able to easily optimize my curve fitting analysis for these different anodes that I was looking at, and it really allowed me to fully understand the changes in the graphitic and amorphous content.

In addition, this system has really high sensitivity as well, which allowed me to identify a lot of different components as well within that. We also have particle analysis software that enabled me to look really closely at particle size and correlate that back to the changing and the mixing speeds as well.

References

1. Wetzel, W.; Spectroscopy Staff. Previewing Spring SciX 2026. Spectroscopy. Available at: https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/previewing-spring-scix-2026 (accessed 2026-05-15).
2. Ferguson, J. Understanding the Impact of the Fabrication Process on Li-ion Battery Anodes Using Chemical Analysis with the Strada® Intelligent Raman Microscope. Presented at Spring SciX, Exeter, United Kingdom, 2026. Available at: https://rapide-diagnostics.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Spring-SciX-Programme.pdf