AVS 61st International Symposium & Exhibition
    Electronic Materials and Processing Wednesday Sessions
       Session EM+EN+TF-WeA

Paper EM+EN+TF-WeA7
Transferring Environmentally Sensitive Battery Materials between GloveBox and UHV Surface Analysis Chamber: Composition Study of Model Battery Interfaces and their Controlled Oxidation

Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 4:20 pm, Room 311

Session: Thin Films and Materials for Energy Storage
Presenter: Hugo Celio, University of Texas at Austin
Correspondent: Click to Email
Environmentally sensitive battery materials prepared in an inert environment (e.g., Argon filled glovebox containing trace levels of water and oxygen at ~1 part-per-million) are often difficult to transfer to an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) chamber for surface analysis. While minimizing additional oxidant(s) exposure, three challenging factors arise from transferring environmentally sensitive materials: 1) Engineering a pump-down load-lock to transition from atmospheric pressure to UHV regime, 2) developing a method to generate a set of figures of merit (FOMs) that allows a user to evaluate transfer reliability, and 3) evaluating of the amount of material that subsequently undergoes, due to reaction with trace ppm levels of oxidants in the Argon gas, oxidation during transfer . To target these issues a novel transfer load-lock/capsule was built and directly coupled to a UHV surface analysis chamber, equipped with X-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS). This new load-lock/capsule has lead to a new capability to study the composition of model battery materials (e.g., silicon anode and metal oxide cathode) at the solid electrolyte interfacial (SEI) layer, including their controlled oxidation post-transfer.