MrMatheus Leal de Souza

Matheus Leal de Souza, PhD, is currently working as a research associate of the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Imperial College London.

His research focuses on studying the degradation of capacity and energy of Li-ion batteries using mainly electrochemical techniques.

It was during the master in engineering and materials science in the Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL - Paris, France) that he grew interest in Li-Ion batteries, notably by synthesizing and characterizing (XRD, ICP-OES, SEM, UV-VIS) NMC electrodes regarding the impact of Cu and Al impurities originated from the recycling process.

In the sequence, under the european project BIG-MAP, he completed his thesis entitled "Advanced Electrochemical Techniques to Track Degradation Mechanisms in Li-Ion Batteries", in the Laboratoire de Reactivité et Chimie des Solides (LRCS - Amiens, France). His work concentrated on using dV/dQ, dQ/dV, post-mortem, PEIS and DRT techniques (all operando and in 2-electrodes cells) to follow degradation modes such as LLI, LAM, Impedance Rise and chemistry changes on each electrode, in cells of different chemistries (LFP, Ni-rich NMC, LNO, Gr, SiGr, LTO...). The knowledge acquired in the broad application of those techniques allowed the optimisation of their protocols.

In addition, during the PhD, he was also responsible for building standards and protocols of coin cell assembly and electrochemical techniques (formation cycles, power tests, GITT, self-discharge, calendar and cycling aging...) for the project consortium, as well as planning and conducting formation and courses of electrochemistry, coin cell assembly and electrodes manufacturing (roll-to-roll process, calendering...). Those activites, attended by industrial and academic partners, as well as postdocs, PhD candidates and master students (of the i-MESC+ program) enlarged his teaching experiences.

At Imperial, in the Electrochemical Science and Engineering (ESE) group, he works in the BESTBUS project, building synthetic driving cycles and test matrix to identify the individual impact of different protocol parameters (temperature, current, SOC...) in the degradation of cylindrical cells in terms of the degradation modes analysis.