An international team of scientists has created the world’s first combination battery suitable for electric cars. The development is distinguished by safety and high performance: it retained 80% of its capacity after 500 charge and discharge cycles. Haytech explains how we will store energy in the future and why today’s batteries are rapidly becoming obsolete.
Phones, electric cars, space stations – all these devices require high-quality, powerful and reliable batteries that can withstand thousands of charge-discharge cycles. To meet these needs, engineers and scientists are creating unusual batteries, such as those with alkali metals, sugar or carbon.
How will the battery of the future work?
An international team of scientists led by Darren Khan and with the participation of LG engineers has developed a high-performance solid-state battery with a pure silicon anode. It was called the battery of the future, because it surpasses all analogues in its properties.
To create such a battery, the authors combined two approaches to the production of batteries for electric cars, so the battery contains a solid-state electrolyte and a silicon anode. The resulting battery has been tested by an international team and confirmed to be safe.
It can also be used not only in electric cars, but also in power grids.
Why are scientists constantly developing new types of batteries? What’s wrong with the ones we use today?
Most often we use lithium-ion batteries, they can be found everywhere: in phones, laptops, cameras. Such batteries are far from ideal: they can store energy for a long time and in large quantities, but they wear out quickly, and are also demanding on the temperature during use and cannot withstand regular and powerful vibrations. The latter affects the operation, for example, in electric vehicles.
The problem is that the crystal structure of lithium-ion batteries changes with every charge-discharge cycle. This means that the arrangement of atoms, which initially provided the required performance, becomes different.
Corrosion also occurs in the battery. Each electrode is connected to a current collector, usually a metal such as copper for the anode and aluminum for the cathode. If this connecting element begins to deteriorate and collapse, then the surface of the current collector will also deform. Therefore, if the metal is corroded, it cannot move electrons efficiently.
Another problem with modern batteries is the material from which they are made. Most of them use cobalt – 60% of the world’s cobalt supply comes from Congo, so the market dependence is extremely high and global production may suffer due to problems with imports.
If lithium-ion batteries are not performing well, will the latest silicon anode batteries replace them?
Yes, but it’s not that simple. Any technology has its drawbacks. Today, silicon anode batteries are used, for example, in Tesla. According to Elon Musk, silicon in electric car batteries helps increase the range by 6%. Also, such batteries have a relatively higher specific capacity – it is about 3 600 mA * h / g.
But there are also problems: for example, this type of anode is unstable, therefore it can be dangerous during operation. If it comes into contact with a liquid electrolyte, then silicon does a poor job of storing energy. In this case, the electric motor loses its power. This is why batteries today are not made entirely of silicon. If its percentage is small, then productivity growth remains minimal.
What other batteries may appear in our devices in the future?
• Lithium carbon battery
Engineers from Mahle have worked with battery manufacturer Allotrope Energy to create a new supercapacitor-based lithium-carbon battery architecture. The new battery is made from a high speed anode combined with a cathode. Both parts are separated by an organic electrolyte. It can quickly charge supercapacitors and store energy at a high density. The developers managed to charge an electric moped with it in 90 seconds.
• Lithium-sulfur battery with sugar
Another scientific work created a lithium-sulfur battery and used sugar to make it more stable. Some sugar-based substances can prevent degradation in geological sediments and also maintain strong bonds between sulfides. As a result, the battery with sugar showed a performance of about 700 mAh / g and worked over 1,000 cycles.
• Alkal metal chlorine battery
Researchers at Stanford University have developed an alkali metal chlorine battery: it is based on the reverse chemical conversion of sodium chloride (Na / Cl2) or lithium chloride (Li / Cl2) to chlorine. The resulting cell showed a rather high discharge capacity – 2 800 mA * h / g of the cathode. But after the first cycle of use, the capacity has halved. Despite this, the battery performed well.
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The batteries of the future will be made from common and easily recyclable materials, and will store energy at a high density and will hardly corrode. So far, engineers and physicists have not managed to create an ideal formula for a battery, but the need for efficient energy storage continues to grow, so we will see many more unusual solutions in this direction.
