  The recent geopolitical crisis resulted in a gas price surge. Although
lithium-ion batteries represent the best available rechargeable battery
technology, a significant energy and power density gap exists between LIBs and
petrol/gasoline. The battery electrodes comprise a mixture of active materials
particles, conductive carbon, and binder additives deposited onto a current
collector. Although this basic design has persisted for decades, the active
material particle's desired size scale is debated. Traditionally,
microparticles have been used in batteries. Advances in nanotechnology have
spurred interest in deploying nanoparticles as active materials. However,
despite many efforts in nano, industries still primarily use 'old'
microparticles. Most importantly, the battery industry is unlikely to replace
microstructures with nanometer-sized analogs. This poses an important question:
Is there a place for nanostructure in battery design due to irreplaceable
microstructure? The way forward lies in multiscale active materials, microscale
structures with built-in nanoscale features, such as microparticles assembled
from nanoscale building blocks or patterned with engineered or natural
nanopores. Although experimental strides have been made in developing such
materials, computational progress in this domain remains limited and, in some
cases, negligible. However, the fields hold immense computational potential,
presenting a multitude of opportunities. This perspective highlights the
existing gaps in modeling multiscale active materials and delineates various
open challenges in the realm of electro-chemo-mechanical modeling. By doing so,
it aims to inspire computational research within this field and promote
synergistic collaborative efforts between computational and experimental
researchers.
