2009, Dreyer, Wolfgang, Guhlke, Clemens, Huth, Robert

We study the almost reversible storage process of charging and discharging of lithium-ion batteries. That process is accompanied by a phase transition and charging and discharging run along different paths, so that hysteretic behavior is observed. We are interested in the storage problem of the cathode of a lithium-ion battery consisting of a system of many iron phosphate (FePO4) particles. There are mathematical models, see [DGJ08], [DGGHJ09] and [DG09], that describe phase transitions and hysteresis exclusively in a single storage particle and they can describe the observed hysteretic voltage-charge plots with almost horizontal plateaus. Interestingly the models predict that the coexistence of a 2-phase system in an individual particle disappears, if its size is below a critical value. The disappearance of the phase transition in the single particle model implies the disappearance of the hysteresis. However, in the experiment hysteretic behavior survives. In other words: The behavior of a storage system consisting of many particles is qualitatively independent of the fact whether the individual particles itself develop a 2-phase system or if they remain in a single phase state. This apparent paradoxical observation will be resolved in this article by a many particle model. It will be shown that if each of the individual particles is in a homogeneous state, nevertheless the many particle ensemble exhibits phase transition and hysteresis ...

2017, Heida, Martin, Kornhuber, Ralf, Podlesny, Joscha

Inspired from geological problems, we introduce a new geometrical setting for homogenization of a well known and well studied problem of an elliptic second order differential operator with jump condition on a multiscale network of interfaces. The geometrical setting is fractal and hence neither periodic nor stochastic methods can be applied to the study of such kind of multiscale interface problem. Instead, we use the fractal nature of the geometric structure to introduce smoothed problems and apply methods from a posteriori theory to derive an estimate for the order of convergence. Computational experiments utilizing an iterative homogenization approach illustrate that the theoretically derived order of convergenceof the approximate problems is close to optimal.

2009, Dreyer, Wolfgang, Gaberscek, Miran, Guhlke, Clemens, Huth, Robert, Jamnik, Janko

We revisit a model which describes the evolution of a phase transition that occurs in the cathode of a rechargeable lithium battery during the process of charging/discharging. The model is capable to simulate hysteretic behavior of the voltage

2009, Garcke, Harald, Kraus, Christiane

We consider the sharp interface limit of a diffuse phase field model with prescribed total mass taking into account a spatially inhomogeneous anisotropic interfacial energy and an elastic energy. The main aim is the derivation of a weak formulation of an anisotropic, inhomogeneous, elastically modified Gibbs-Thomson law in the sharp interface limit. To this end we show that one can pass to the limit in the weak formulation of the Euler-Lagrange equation of the diffuse phase field energy

2007, Dreyer, Wolfgang, Gaberšček, Miran, Jamnik, Janko

We represent a model which describes the evolution of a phase transition that occurs in some part of a rechargeable lithium battery during the process of charging/discharging. The model is capable to simulate the hysteretic behavior of the voltage - charge characteristics. During discharging of the battery, the interstitial lattice sites of a small crystalline host system are filled up with lithium atoms and these are released again during charging. We show within the context of a sharp interface model that two mechanical phenomena go along with a phase transition that appears in the host system during supply and removal of lithium. At first the lithium atoms need more space than it is available by the interstitial lattice sites, which leads to a maximal relative change of the crystal volume of about $6%$. Furthermore there is an interface between two adjacent phases that has very large curvature of the order of magnitude 100 m, which evoke here a discontinuity of the normal component of the stress. In order to simulate the dynamics of the phase transitions and in particular the observed hysteresis we establish a new initial and boundary value problem for a nonlinear PDE system that can be reduced in some limiting case to an ODE system.

2006, Knees, Dorothee, Sändig, Anna-Margarete

It is well known that high stress concentrations can occur in elastic composites in particular due to the interaction of geometrical singularities like corners, edges and cracks and structural singularities like jumping material parameters. In the project C5 "Stress concentrations in heterogeneous materials" of the SFB 404 "Multifield Problems in Solid and Fluid Mechanics" it was mathematically analyzed where and which kind of stress singularities in coupled linear and nonlinear elastic structures occur. In the linear case asymptotic expansions near the geometrical and structural peculiarities are derived, formulae for generalized stress intensity factors included. In the nonlinear case such expansions are unknown in general and regularity results are proved for elastic materials with power-law constitutive equations with the help of the difference quotient technique combined with a quasi-monotone covering condition for the subdomains and the energy densities. Furthermore, some applications of the regularity results to shape and structure optimization and the Griffith fracture criterion in linear and nonlinear elastic structures are discussed. Numerical examples illustrate the results.