Measurement of Particle Size Distribution of Battery Slurries Using Ultrasonic Attenuation Spectroscopy

The particle size distribution and dispersion uniformity of the granular active material in the battery slur???ries have a direct impact on the important properties of the battery such as internal resistance???voltage???local surfacecurrent???and total polarization degree.It is of great significance for the quality control of the battery if its present linecan be measured in real time.Based on the characteristics of high solid content???high viscosity and low transmittanceof battery slurry???this paper investigates the measurement of its particle size distribution by ultrasonic attenuationspectroscopy.The biggest difficulty in applying to the particle size distribution measurement of battery slurries isthat its model for predicting the particle size distribution using the ultrasound attenuation spectroscopy requiresdifficult-to-obtain physical parameters of the dispersed and continuous phases.In this paper???principal componentanalysis???PCA???combined with error back propagation???BP???neural network is proposed to establish a prediction modelto solve the difficulties of ultrasonic attenuation spectroscopy method???and genetic algorithm???GA???is introduced tooptimize the initial weights and thresholds of the BP network.Combined with the battery slurry with LiCoO2as theactive material for validation???the results show that the PCA-GA-BP neural network can effectively predict theparticle size distribution of battery slurry with different solid contents???and the predicted values have high peak shape overlap with the real values and small peak height deviation???with the mean square error of0.1358and the degree offit???R2???of0.9816???indicating that ultrasonic attenuation spectroscopy can be used as an important way to measure theparticle size distribution of battery slurry.