Electric field within a battery

[book_collector]

However, when working in the battery industry and researching how batteries work, how they fail, and why, things like this become relevant. I was just looking for "electric field in a battery" in the hopes someone else has made the same observations as we have.

The generic dipole electric field lines (stretched a bit due to battery geometry) we can see with thermal imaging because potential causes current, and current causes heat. Heat kills battery, hence, interest in field lines. So far as I can tell nobody has seen this, and I would not normally think of it except something that looks like a field line is produced in some test cells and if we run them long enough, they burn up the same way.

Interesting.
The fact that the patterns you see mimic field lines does not necessarilly indicate a direct relation to electric field. There are a variety "conserved flow" situations which generate a similar pattern. But maybe it is electric field driven. I am cerainly not an expert!

This is true of course. I am not an electrical engineer, but found myself working in the battery field where I examine battery chemistries and why they work (or don't work). I paid attention in school, and when I saw these anomolies it does in fact resemble electric field lines quite strongly, in fact... nearly identical. These were observed indirectly of course, through thermal signature, but if you pump enough current through a conductor, you generate heat due to resistance.

This of course i not total nonsense, but at the same time I lack the background in EE to really help me out. What I do know is electric field lines are generated by electric charges between a dipole. This is old textbook stuff going back many decades.

Consider a battery, an ion battery, where you have current flowing both ways - electricity in one direction, and positive ions in the other. The pattern is almost a spot-on match for the generic textbook illustration of field lines. Both the anode and cathode materials are good electrical conductors, so the charge migration would be mostly laminar in a layered battery, at some point crossing over to the opposing electrode. This should follow some sort of "path of least resistance" which in a current that is high enough could form waves with nodes and troughs in what is essentially a 2D space.

I was looking through the literature, then the internet for anything that may give me clues to previous work, and came across this thread. Which is full of experts, of course.

 

[book_collector]

Interesting.
The fact that the patterns you see mimic field lines does not necessarilly indicate a direct relation to electric field. There are a variety "conserved flow" situations which generate a similar pattern. But maybe it is electric field driven. I am cerainly not an expert!

Since there is definitely a current flow, this lends to a field being created since it's a dipole with current flowing in one direction at a specified rate. It was an accidental obersvation but it was ironic because I predicted it as a possibility based on physical findings in the damaged parts of another battery of the same model.