Glimpse’s mission is to enable battery quality at scale. We recently wrote a preprint discussing this problem at length. Over the course of this work, we identified a number of open questions that I think would be very interesting for academic research. I think many of these problems are both highly impactful yet deeply fundamentally interesting. Here are ten that I think are particularly interesting, complete with emojis:

  1. 📋 What are all possible battery defects that can cause functional failure or safety events? Which of these absolutely cannot be present in products?

  2. 📊 How can we set anode-cathode overhang specs as a function of cell design and use case?

  3. 🟠 🕳️ Under what circumstances should we be concerned about metallic contaminants, separator pinholes, and similar?

  4. ↪️ 🍽️ When do buckled and/or high-curvature electrode stacks lead to lithium plating?

  5. 🖐🏼 How does poor cell-level conformance impact pack reliability?

  6. 🚗 What pack designs maximize pack-level reliability?

  7. 🔋📦👝 What cell designs (chemistry, form factor) maximize cell-level reliability?

  8. ⚖️ How can we quantify the tradeoffs between energy and quality?

  9. ⏳ Can we design accelerated tests and/or prediction models for hard-to-predict functional failures and safety events?

  10. 🔬 What is the minimum set of characterization techniques needed for comprehensive battery lifetime evaluation? (Multimodal foundation models?)

I saw a new paper on #2 today: Lithium Plating at the Cell Edge Induced by Anode Overhang during Cycling in Lithium-Ion Batteries: Part I. Modeling and Mechanism.