Quantifying, Understanding and Evaluating the Effects of Gas Consumption in Lithium-Ion Cells

Lithium-ion cells produce a considerable amount of gas in their first cycle. If the gases are not removed in a degassing step, most are consumed by the cell over time. This phenomenon has never been investigated explicitly in the literature. In this paper, the evolution and subsequent consumption of gas in typical lithium-ion cells are measured by Archimedes' principle and gas chromatography. It is found that all evolved gases are subsequently consumed to some degree, except for saturated hydrocarbons. The consumption of gas occurs predominantly at the negative electrode, where the gases are reduced to form part of the solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI). Changes to the negative electrode SEI upon gas consumption are investigated using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The effect of gas consumption on cell performance is studied with ultra-high precision charging and high voltage storage experiments. It is found that gas consumption does not result in measurable adverse effects to cell performance. (c) The Author(s) 2017. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.