Discharge precipitate's impact in Li-air battery: Comparison of experiment and model predictions

This paper presents a fundamental study on the precipitate formation/morphology and impact of discharge precipitates in Li-air batteries and compares the voltage loss with two Li-air battery models, namely a film-resistor model and surface coverage model. Toray carbon cloth is selected as cathode, which serves as large-porosity electrodes with an approximately planar reaction surface. Imaging analysis shows film formation of precipitates is observed in all the experiments. In addition, toroidal and aggregate morphologies are present under lower currents as well. Specially, toroidal or partially toroidal deposit is observed for 0.06 A/cm2. Aggregates, which consist of small particles with grain boundaries, are shown for 0.03 A/cm2. We found that the film-resistor model is unable to predict the discharge voltage behaviors under the two lower currents due to the presence of the deposit morphologies other than the film formation. The coverage model's prediction shows acceptable agreement with the experimental data because the model accounts for impacts of various morphologies of precipitates

Using porous metals to enhance heat transfer in phase change materials (PCMs)

Heat transfer enhancement mechanism of Phase Change Materials (PCMs) by high-porosity metal foams was investigated in this study. The Darcy-Brinkman-Forchheimer modified flow model was employed in the numerical simulations to consider the non-Darcy effects in metal foams: viscous flow resistance and inertia flow resistance. Local Non-Thermal Equilibrium (LNTE) model was used to consider the temperature difference between PCM and metal foam. The results showed that in the solid and two-phase zone the heat transfer rate in PCMs was significantly increased by metal foams, whilst in the liquid zone, natural convection was found to be weakened by the large flow resistance of metal foams, despite which the overall heat transfer rate was still higher than the case where metal foams were not used. Metal foams of low porosity and high pore density were found to perform better than the ones of high porosity and low pore density