The research on lithium-oxygen batteries faces a number of issues ranging from design problems to elementary reaction kinetics. Depending on solvent, lithium salt and electrode materials several chemical reaction pathways of lithium and oxygen have been proposed. Oxygen solubility and transport are among the most pressing issues that limit the battery performance. In this work purging oxygen through an electrolyte soaked gas diffusion layer (GDL) was investigated as a possible route towards improving the availability of oxygen to the cell reaction. Additionally based on the findings, a method to estimating the absorption constant of oxygen into the electrolyte is proposed. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.