Advancing Clean Energy Through Sustainable Battery Research with Electron Microscopy Technology

Electron microscopy technology

Meet the scientists who enabled the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This highly committed team will now enable safer and more sustainable batteries with electron microscopy technology and more.

Nine months. That’s the average time it takes an assembly team to proudly wheel a custom-built electron microscope out of the Thermo Fisher Scientific factory hall and into the world. After an intensive period of meticulously combining a vast array of components and making precision adjustments, to the engineer-builders it is truly a labor of love. Who are the people behind the Material Science instrument lifecycle? Alex Jonkers, Director Operations, and Diana Mäkel, Innovation Lead Digital Services, are two of them. These innovation enthusiasts happily discuss their vision and experiences. Alex shares: “We are really helping the world move forward. Hardly anyone can do what we do. That feels very special.”

In 2019, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists who worked on developing the lithium-ion battery, the most popular rechargeable battery in chemistry used today. The impact and uses of these energy sources are vast, from powering portable electronics to electric vehicles (EVs) and the market for them continues to grow. In sync, the search for safer, longer-lasting, and higher energy density batteries continues. To help in this pursuit for cleaner energy, analytical techniques to study battery components are key, and that’s where Thermo Fisher’s electron microscopy technology scientists come in.

Thermo Scientific electron microscopes used in coronavirus research

Electron microscope uses go beyond battery research and clean energy. For example, the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies used these instruments to develop the vaccines and medicines that fought the global COVID-19 pandemic. “Our microscopes captured the coronavirus”, the factory leader continues. “With our microscopes, pharmaceutical companies were able to grasp the atomic structure of the crucial spikes.”

Now Alex, Diana and their colleagues are embarking on their next mission: enabling our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer through helping to create more sustainable batteries. Alex explains, “With our instruments you can see things that no one has ever seen, and make things possible that no one ever has.”

How does such an impressive tool come about? 

A microscope sits in the test hall for about nine months and the process begins with stacking. Alex describes: “We build a tower of steel that is up to four meters tall. Once we have placed the electron source on top, we work towards a very special moment we call ‘first light’: running a beam through the instrument for the first time. The ultimate moment, however, is when the team watches the instrument pass the high-resolution test, showing the maximum magnification.

Achieving this exciting test result requires the elimination of every vibration in the microscope. The casing surrounding the instrument is a major factor in this. Once that challenge is surmounted, the team can finalize the instrument into a fully-fledged product, by tuning it to perfection. “For this we need completely round lenses”, Alex says. “To yield an optimal, sharp and focused image at an atomic level, we need to exactly correct and counter-correct the instrument settings.” Each correction impacts the entire beam. Adjustments at the bottom necessitate corrections at the top, and the other way around. After this, the team that worked diligently for over half a year proudly rolls their microscope out of the factory together. They literally wave it off as it makes its way to the customer. Alex shares: “I can ensure you that it generates happy faces when a fully loaded truck finally heads off!”

Highly talented puzzle-solvers, tackling every quirk

Clearly, Alex and his team don’t make an easy product. “Everything we do is tailormade. Each customer needs something different, and all systems have their own quirks. Based on the needs of each customer, we create new versions of our electron microscopes. We usually sell technical solutions that don’t exist yet and have never been produced before.” As an example, Alex mentions a university that received funding to create something entirely new for the world: “The tailormade hi-tech instruments we provide allow them to engage in this revolutionary research.”

To assemble a solid instrument, you must have a passion for puzzles, Alex explains. On average, a microscope has 50 key areas to address and, as always when innovating, challenges can arise. “Our team of masterminds unite to solve them all. It’s like an escape room. You have to crack a few dozen tests and if you succeed, at the end the door will open. Then you walk out as a team of winners, with a state-of-the-art structure that will advance the world in unprecedented ways.”

What if the team doesn’t succeed in finding the solution?

When faced with seemingly impossible challenges, Alex and his team work together with their colleagues from R&D to address dead ends. With united and tireless forces, they go above and beyond. “If something doesn’t work out as scheduled, we mobilize a bevy of the smartest, most ingenuous colleagues and devise a plan. There are 24 hours in a day and if needed, we will work zealously, in evening, overnight and weekend shifts, until the challenge is resolved. There’s only one thing we don’t try: giving up. That’s just not in our DNA.”

Optimal solutions that serve customers
When finding solutions, Alex, Diana and their teams look at the complete instrument lifecycle. Diana shares: “Microscopes never actually break down, but the battery market is developing quickly and the transition from research to upscaled production must move quickly too. Technology gets better and better. We continually look at how we can help clients deal with this sustainably and responsibly.”

On-site experiences allow Thermo Fisher Scientific’s product developers to hear from our customers about how they do their jobs and what challenges they face. This helps them develop instruments and solutions best suited to help tackle those.

Recently, Diana had the chance to visit a battery factory in Germany. The experience proved invaluable: “If you’ve never visited such an environment, you probably can’t imagine the size. The raw materials warehouse was gigantic! They are called gigafactories for a reason.”

The Innovation Lead continues: “Our teams need to see manufacturing floors themselves to really understand the scale at which battery production is happening, and to fully grasp what is important to the people working there. This is not something you learn from reading a document or joining a meeting. You need to walk through the factory to really understand.”

Also, research institutes and labs are important to visit regularly: “They are innovators in clean energy and advance new methodologies for development and recycling. Learning from their extensive material and other knowledge helps us find more sustainable or even circular solutions for our instruments.”

In turn, Thermo Fisher Scientific and their instruments contribute to incredible advances in battery research. For example, they provide insights needed to bring scientific solutions and discoveries to efficient production. “That’s a totally different environment, which requires scaling up technology and assessing cost”, Diana shares. Thermo Fisher colleagues addressed this topic in a review article published in the Nature Energy journal earlier this year. In it, they identified blind spots in scaling up lithium-based battery materials and components to accelerate future low-cost battery manufacturing.

One example is in the process of creating an electrode during battery manufacturing, where the active material is coated on top of the metal foil. This new development using dry material instead of a wet coating yields cost, energy and time efficiencies. It also avoids the use of a toxic solvent. A great contribution to clean energy, cost savings for the customer and a better environment.

“By sharing experiences, we are learning together, both us and our customers”, Diana explains. “We jointly build up knowledge, develop workflows and find answers to challenges that never existed before. That’s what makes this new market so exciting!”

Batteries as clean energy technology

The team’s next challenge is to optimally contribute to clean energy solutions. Diana explains: “Making batteries safer and more durable can help prevent them from catching fire, and ensure that EV battery technology, also used for laptops and cell phones, will last longer too. Without capacity loss.”

The pandemic was a time of great hardship for many people, but professionally speaking, it also brought something positive, Diana points out. “The challenges we faced during COVID-19 taught us a lot, in a short period of time”, the service innovation expert and physicist says. “While enabling the development of vaccines and treatments via the use of our instruments, we learned how valuable remote solutions are. In particular, how they allow us to ensure business continuity for our customers over a distance. This is possible due to remote maintenance and update services which also save a lot of time and costs, while significantly reducing the impact on the environment through CO2 savings. This starts with integrated service solutions where the customer enters a contract for top-notch proactive services after purchasing the instrument. 

“Through our remote solutions we are much faster. We don’t have to drive 1.5 hours or take the plane to see what’s happening. We can simply call the customer and have a real-time view”, Diana explains. “Our microscopes send data to our platforms every hour. Guided by this information, we can perform proactive quality control, and plan maintenance and updates. Operating along these lines dramatically reduces travel, hours, and movements. It also results in far less outage. Prior to the pandemic the market didn’t realize the benefits and importance of this.”

As maintenance and updates become schedulable, teams get a better work-life balance. This applies to Diana and her colleagues but also their customers. “Planning this work proactively brings peace of mind. With this new, innovative way of working, both the customer and the technician are assured of optimal use of our instruments, and we all experience less stress.”

As Alex and Diana’s stories clearly illustrate, the team enables customers to do brilliant things. Passion, drive and teamwork enable breakthrough electron microscopy technology innovations to be reached. We look forward to announcing the next one soon!

Find out more about how we are building a brighter future together and learn more about how we are powering battery research and manufacturing.

 

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Dieter Hofmann is the Senior Director / General Manager for Batteries, Materials Science at Thermo Fisher Scientific