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Ontario Tech acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation.

We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

Learn more about Indigenous Education and Cultural Services

October 21, 2015

Title: Quantitatively measuring and explaining one mechanism for the deterioration of lithium-ion batteries

Speaker: Dr. Jamie Foster, Department of Mathematics, McMaster University

Abstract: In the first part of the talk I will give a general overview of the current state-of-the-art in lithium-ion technology, and a review of the remaining challenges. In particular I will highlight the role of the deterioration of the morphology of the binder matrix in causing the fading of cell performance - it is this aging mechanism that will be the focus of the remainder of the talk. I will then introduce a framework that utilities image acquisition, processing and analysis, and homogenisation techniques, to meaningfully quantify the changes in geometry that occur during operation in real devices. Motivated by the findings of this work, in the final part of the talk, I will present a fluid-/solid-mechanical model for these electrodes that is solved via ad-hoc upscaling of the governing equations. This procedure results in a multiscale problem that links morphological changes on the microscopic scale to deformations on the macroscopic scale. The resulting problems are solved using a combination of asymptotic analysis and finite element methods. The predictions of the model exhibit a good agreement with the FIB/SEM images.