According to a recent blog post on the website of the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the lithium-air battery has the potential to revolutionize battery technology as we know it. The blog quotes Argonne Distinguished Fellow Larry Curtiss as saying that the lithium-air battery has the highest projected energy density of all current battery technologies and is being considered for the next generation of batteries beyond lithium-ion.
Curtiss goes on to explain that the new design for the lithium-air battery has the potential to reach a record energy density of 1200 watt-hours per kilogram. This is almost four times better than lithium-ion batteries, which currently dominate the market.
The new lithium-air design could allow electric cars to travel more than 1,000 miles on a single charge, or even power long-haul trucks and domestic airplanes. The battery’s solid electrolyte is its main component, instead of the liquid electrolyte used in lithium-ion batteries, which can be a safety hazard.
The team’s lithium-air battery design is the first to achieve a four-electron reaction at room temperature, and it can operate with oxygen supplied from the surrounding environment. This means that it is capable of running on air, making oxygen tanks redundant, which was a problem with earlier designs.
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The research team used various techniques to establish that a four-electron reaction was indeed occurring. One of the main techniques was the transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of the discharge products on the cathode surface. The TEM images highlighted some important insights from the four-electron discharge mechanism.
Previous lithium-air battery tests have suffered from short cycle lives, but the team found that this was not the case for the new battery design as it built and operated a test cell for 1,000 cycles. This demonstrated the battery’s stability when it came to repeated charge and discharge.
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Charging cycles degrade the life of the battery over time, so the longer the battery’s charging cycles, the longer its life span is likely to be. With its potential for a longer life span and higher energy density, the lithium-air battery is an exciting development in battery technology.