How to extend battery life of ELECTRIC VEHICLES ft. Anastasiia Mikheenkova

In this episode

• How Anastasiia ages electric car batteries in the lab, then takes the cells apart to see what changed
• Her go-to tools for aged batteries: scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction, backed up by synchrotron techniques
• Her path from hands-on lab work in her bachelor’s, via an Erasmus Mundus master’s in France and Italy and sodium-ion battery research in Switzerland, to a PhD at Uppsala University
• The project she picked: tracking how the metals and oxygen in a commercial battery’s positive electrode lose activity as it ages
• Why deep scientific conversations give her energy
• Her three wishes: equal opportunities and diversity, more transparency and less rivalry in science, and more focus on mental health

Key Takeaways

• PhD student at Uppsala University who ‘destroys batteries for a living’, ageing commercial EV cells under realistic conditions, then tearing them apart to study the positive electrode at electrode, particle and atomic level.
• Favourite tools: SEM and XRD for fast morphology/structure, plus synchrotron X-ray absorption spectroscopy.
• A Erasmus Mundus master on large-scale facilities and a Switzerland internship on sodium-ion batteries set her path.
• Values deep scientific conversations that leave your ‘brain heavy’, and the diversity of backgrounds in battery science; stresses PhD students are scientists, not ‘just students’.
• Wishes: equal opportunities and more diversity, transparency about career paths with less rivalry/politics, and more focus on mental health (less romanticising of working 24/7).

Listen on

About the guest

Anastasiia Mikheenkova is a PhD student at Uppsala University in Sweden, where she studies why lithium-ion cells in electric vehicles degrade, focusing on the positive electrode from the macro to the nano level. She studied nanotechnology at Samara Aerospace University and completed the MaMaSELF Erasmus Mundus master’s, with degrees from Rennes and Torino.

Anastasiia Mikheenkova curated the Real Scientists Nano Twitter account (@RealSci_Nano) from August 13 to August 22 2023. Read all of Anastasiia’s tweets from that week.