Lithium-Air Cathode: Lateral Pore-Clogging Fingers (2D)

This 2D companion to the 3D lithium-air cathode simulator replaces the single azimuthally-symmetric depth column with a genuine two-dimensional finite-volume solve of oxygen diffusion, reaction and pore clogging across both depth and lateral position. Each lateral "column" of the porous carbon cathode is given its own intrinsic pore diffusivity, drawn from a smoothed random field whose spread is the pore-network heterogeneity control — at 0% every column behaves identically, reproducing the 3D twin's uniform-column assumption exactly, while higher heterogeneity lets clogging concentrate into preferential channels the way real spent Li-O₂ cathode cross-sections show. Because the cell's overpotential is driven by the mean of each column's local transport penalty rather than by the spatial average, a patchy cathode reaches its voltage-collapse "sudden death" a little earlier than an equally-porous-on-average uniform one — a real, numerically verified consequence of lateral heterogeneity that a 1D-averaged model cannot produce.