Over the last semester, I got the chance to work at UIA’s Battery Coast Lab in Grimstad on a project called Homogeneity Mapping of Commercial Battery Degradation. The basic idea is to look at how the cathode in a battery cell degrades. We use a device that applies an electrolyte to the electrode and tracks the electrode potential vs. Li/Li⁺ over time. The big draw is speed: it’s a high-throughput alternative to traditional half-cell teardowns, which are slow and only ever cover a small piece of the electrode.
My job was getting the machine ready for testing. A lot of that came down to learning the Arduino IDE and modifying the code so that the device’s pattern density and dimensions matched the electrode’s width and length we wanted to test. I also reworked the cathode roller construction, which kept letting the cathode drift sideways, and added guards to keep it in place. And the anode and cathode we were using to test the cathode potential weren’t working properly, so those needed fixing too.
More than anything, this gave me the kind of real-world experience you just can’t get in a classroom. I got to dig into an actual research problem, with real hardware that didn’t always cooperate, and figure things out as I went. I was lucky to do it alongside some genuinely wonderful people who were patient with all my questions and happy to share what they knew. It was a cool project to be part of, the kind where you can see exactly why the work matters, and I came away having learned a huge amount, both about battery degradation itself and about what hands-on research looks like day to day.