While the interest and frequency of performing operando neutron diffraction experiments for lithium ion batteries has increased significantly over the past few years, it is still not nearly as popular as operandoX-ray diffraction. A major contributor to this is the high difficulty of constructing an electrochemical cell which balances both electrochemical performance, quality of the obtained diffraction pattern and cost of construction. Up until now most work has been performed on, often complex, custom cells built to target a specific feature such as, fast cycling at the cost of data quality or data quality with high material loading [1-3]. What if, however, a complicated cell was not required? What if commonly used commercial cells could be adapted to obtain a high quality diffraction pattern with minimal effort?

By taking inspiration from operando X-ray diffraction cells based on modified coin cells, we have modified a coin cell to be used for operandoneutron diffraction experiments. The modified cells contain a large quantity of active material (~300-400 mg) to a much smaller quantity of electrolyte (~10-50 μL), separator and lithium metal. The smaller quantity of electrolyte is particularly important as it significantly reduces the cost of the experiment if deuterated electrolyte is employed. Further, despite the large quantity of sample, the cells exhibited favourable electrochemistry when cycled at C/10. Using this cell high quality diffraction data could be obtained (Figure 1).

This contribution will therefore focus on the diffraction results that can be obtained from such a cell by comparing to earlier wound cells. It is anticipated that such a cell design will make neutron diffraction accessible to more research groups and also presents a viable cell design for operandostudies of sodium ion cells.

[1] N. Sharma, X. Guo, G. Du, Z. Guo, J. Wang, Z. Wang, and V. K. Peterson. J. Am. Chem. Soc.134 (2012), 7867

[2] M. Roberts, J. J. Biendicho, S. Hull, P. Beran, T. Gustafsson, G. Svensson and K. Edström. J. Power Sources 226 (2013), 249.

[3] M. Bianchini, J.B. Leriche, J.L. Laborier, L. Gendrin, E. Suard, L. Croguennec, C. Masquelier, J. Electrochem, Soc., 160 (2013) A2176.