A new all-solid sulfur-based battery has been created and tested by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US. While Lithium-Sulphur (Li-S) batteries are nothing new, this solid state form is a significant step forward as being cheaper, less flammable, and have four times the energy density when compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries.
The advances in science regarding batteries is somewhat overdue, with sales in the hundreds of millions every year of mobile phones and tablets – all currently reliant on Li-ion battery technology – advances in electronics has been incredibly fast, whereas battery technology has been slow to keep up resulting in many people having to charge their devices daily rather than weekly say.
The major significance of Li-S batteries is that they have the ability to store up to 4 times the energy of their Li-ion counterparts, which, in simple terms, means electronic devices are able to last 4 times longer, or an electric vehicle have a range 4 times further. Of course, this news is of major interest to the electric car community since that would, for example, give cars with an existing range of 200 miles per charge an increase to 1000 miles per charge. Of course, that is simplistic and there are lots of other obstacles to overcome before that will be seen. Of equal importance to the electric car community is the solid state nature of the batteries. Previously, batteries have been known to blow up – such as Li-ion batteries in laptops and more recently in the infamous case of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, all of which were grounded due to battery fire concerns. In electric cars, though rigorous testing is done for fire safety (in fact much more so than most other non battery powered vehicles) the ability to use a solid state battery significantly reduces risk of fire in the event of an accident. So, there are several reasons why Li-S batteries are the ones to watch out for in the coming future and which ought to be powering the latest electric cars very soon.
The below press release was issued by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and shows the progress in development from the original liquid state Li-S batteries to their development of it into a solid state:
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed and tested an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with approximately four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion technologies that power today’s electronics.
The ORNL battery design, which uses abundant low-cost elemental sulfur, also addresses flammability concerns experienced by other chemistries.
“Our approach is a complete change from the current battery concept of two electrodes joined by a liquid electrolyte, which has been used over the last 150 to 200 years,” said Chengdu Liang, lead author on the ORNL study published this week in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Scientists have been excited about the potential of lithium-sulfur batteries for decades, but long-lasting, large-scale versions for commercial applications have proven elusive. Researchers were stuck with a catch-22 created by the battery’s use of liquid electrolytes: On one hand, the liquid helped conduct ions through the battery by allowing lithium polysulfide compounds to dissolve. The downside, however, was that the same dissolution process caused the battery to prematurely break down.
The ORNL team overcame these barriers by first synthesizing a never-before-seen class of sulfur-rich materials that conduct ions as well as the lithium metal oxides conventionally used in the battery’s cathode. Liang’s team then combined the new sulfur-rich cathode and a lithium anode with a solid electrolyte material, also developed at ORNL, to create an energy-dense, all-solid battery.
“This game-changing shift from liquid to solid electrolytes eliminates the problem of sulfur dissolution and enables us to deliver on the promise of lithium-sulfur batteries,” Liang said. “Our battery design has real potential to reduce cost, increase energy density and improve safety compared with existing lithium-ion technologies.”
The new ionically-conductive cathode enabled the ORNL battery to maintain a capacity of 1200 milliamp-hours (mAh) per gram after 300 charge-discharge cycles at 60 degrees Celsius. For comparison, a traditional lithium-ion battery cathode has an average capacity between 140-170 mAh/g. Because lithium-sulfur batteries deliver about half the voltage of lithium-ion versions, this eight-fold increase in capacity demonstrated in the ORNL battery cathode translates into four times the gravimetric energy density of lithium-ion technologies, explained Liang.
The team’s all-solid design also increases battery safety by eliminating flammable liquid electrolytes that can react with lithium metal. Chief among the ORNL battery’s other advantages is its use of elemental sulfur, a plentiful industrial byproduct of petroleum processing.
“Sulfur is practically free,” Liang said. “Not only does sulfur store much more energy than the transition metal compounds used in lithium-ion battery cathodes, but a lithium-sulfur device could help recycle a waste product into a useful technology.”
Although the team’s new battery is still in the demonstration stage, Liang and his colleagues hope to see their research move quickly from the laboratory into commercial applications. A patent on the team’s design is pending.
“This project represents a synergy between basic science and applied research,” Liang said. “We used fundamental research to understand a scientific phenomenon, identified the problem and then created the right material to solve that problem, which led to the success of a device with real-world applications.”
The study is published as “Lithium Polysulfidophosphates: A Family of Lithium-Conducting Sulfur-Rich Compounds for Lithium-Sulfur Batteries,” and is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201300680 . In addition to Liang, coauthors are ORNL’s Zhan Lin, Zengcai Liu, Wujun Fu and Nancy Dudney.
The research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, through the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. The investigation of the ionic conductivity of the new compounds was supported by the Department’s Office of Science.
The synthesis and characterization was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at ORNL. CNMS is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers supported by the DOE Office of Science, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit http://science.energy.gov/bes/suf/user-facilities/nanoscale-science-research-centers.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States.
Source; Oak Ridge National Laboratory
