May

20

Silly Putty and Lithium Make a Great Battery

May 20, 2014 | Leave a Comment

Researchers at the University of California Riverside, Bourns College of Engineering, have developed a new way to make lithium ion batteries using a material found in Silly Putty that will last three times longer between charges compared to the current industry standard.

The Silly Putty material, silicon dioxide (SiO2), is also found in surgical tubing and other mundane items.

The team built SiO2 nanotube anodes for lithium ion batteries and found they had over three times as much energy storage capacity as the carbon-based anodes currently being used. This has significant implications for industries including electronics and electric vehicles, which are always trying to squeeze longer discharges out of batteries.

Silicon Dioxide Polymer and Test Battery. Click image for the largest view. Image Credit: UC Riverside.

Silicon Dioxide Polymer and Test Battery. Click image for the largest view. Image Credit: UC Riverside.

The team’s paper, “Stable Cycling of SiO2 Nanotubes as High-Performance Anodes for Lithium-Ion Batteries,” has been published online without a a paywall in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Lead author Zachary Favors said, “We are taking the same material used in kids’ toys and medical devices and even fast food and using it to create next generation battery materials.”

The paper was co-authored by Cengiz S. Ozkan, a mechanical engineering professor, Mihrimah Ozkan, an electrical engineering professor, and several of their current and former graduate students: Wei Wang, Hamed Hosseinni Bay, Aaron George and Favors.

The team focused originally on silicon dioxide because it is an extremely abundant compound, environmentally friendly, non-toxic, and found in many other products.

Silicon dioxide has previously been used as an anode material in lithium ion batteries, but the ability to synthesize the material into highly uniform exotic nanostructures with high energy density and long cycle life has been limited.

Here is where the breakthrough lies. Their key finding was that the team’s silicon dioxide nanotubes are extremely stable in batteries, which is important because it means a longer lifespan. Specifically, the UC SiO2 nanotube anodes were cycled 100 times without any loss in energy storage capability and the authors are highly confident that they could be cycled hundreds of more times.

Silicon Dioxide Nanotube Fabrication at UC Riverside. Click image for the largest view.

Silicon Dioxide Nanotube Fabrication at UC Riverside. Click image for the largest view.

The research team is now focused on developing methods to scale up production of the SiO2 nanotubes in hopes they could become a commercially viable product.

Using silicon as an anode material, has been a research target for many years due to its high theoretical capacity. But silicon experiences a major increase in physical volume, as much as tripling n size as a lithium storage medium.

Lots of ideas have come and gone in the effort to get to commercial scale outside of the developing labs.

So far this all sounds simple. Its not. But for those interested the paper is open, meaning click and read, not paywalled out of sight. Its a fairly short paper, but has one of the better openings allowing the curious a good view of the background and the team’s progress.

Thanks to the team for a new process to get silicon into the lithium ion battery and Nature for the decency for having the paper out in the open.


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