May
20
A Battery That Has 10,000 Charge Discharge Cycles
May 20, 2021 | 3 Comments
Cornell University researchers have now shown that a new technique incorporating aluminum results in rechargeable batteries that offer up to 10,000 error-free cycles. The researchers have been exploring the use of low-cost materials to create rechargeable batteries that will make energy storage more affordable.
The cost of harvesting solar energy has dropped so much in recent years that it’s giving traditional energy sources a run for their money. However, the challenges of energy storage – which require the capacity to bank an intermittent and seasonally variable supply of solar energy – have kept the technology from being economically competitive.
Cornell University researchers led by Lynden Archer, Dean and Professor of Engineering, have been exploring the use of low-cost materials to create rechargeable batteries that will make energy storage more affordable. Now, they have shown that a new technique incorporating aluminum results in rechargeable batteries that offer up to 10,000 error-free cycles.
This new kind of battery could provide a safer and more environmentally friendly alternative to lithium-ion batteries, which currently dominate the market but are slow to charge and have a knack for catching fire.
The paper’s lead author is Jingxu (Kent) Zheng, Ph.D. ’20, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This highly magnified image shows aluminum deposited on carbon fibers in a battery electrode. The chemical bond makes the electrode thicker and its kinetics faster, resulting in a rechargeable battery that is safer, less expensive and more sustainable than lithium-ion batteries. Image Credit: Cornell University. Click image for the largest view.
“A very interesting feature of this battery is that only two elements are used for the anode and the cathode – aluminum and carbon – both of which are inexpensive and environmentally friendly,” Zheng said. “They also have a very long cycle life. When we calculate the cost of energy storage, we need to amortize it over the overall energy throughput, meaning that the battery is rechargeable, so we can use it many, many times. So if we have a longer service life, then this cost will be further reduced.”
Among the advantages of aluminum is that it is abundant in the earth’s crust, it is trivalent and light, and it therefore has a high capacity to store more energy than many other metals. However, aluminum can be tricky to integrate into a battery’s electrodes. It reacts chemically with the glass fiber separator, which physically divides the anode and the cathode, causing the battery to short circuit and fail.
The researchers’ solution was to design a substrate of interwoven carbon fibers that forms an even stronger chemical bond with aluminum. When the battery is charged, the aluminum is deposited into the carbon structure via covalent bonding, i.e., the sharing of electron pairs between aluminum and carbon atoms.
While electrodes in conventional rechargeable batteries are only two dimensional, this technique uses a three-dimensional – or nonplanar – architecture and creates a deeper, more consistent layering of aluminum that can be finely controlled.
“Basically we use a chemical driving force to promote a uniform deposition of aluminum into the pores of the architecture,” Zheng said. “The electrode is much thicker and it has much faster kinetics.”
The aluminum-anode batteries can be reversibly charged and discharged one or more orders of magnitude more times than other aluminum rechargeable batteries under practical conditions.
“Although superficially different from our earlier innovations for stabilizing zinc and lithium metal electrodes in batteries, the principle is the same – design substrates that provide a large thermodynamic driving force that promotes nucleation; and runaway, unsafe growth of the metal electrode is prevented by forces such as surface tension that can be massive at small scales,” said Archer, the paper’s senior author.
Ten thousand charge / discharge cycles must be a world record. A daily charge routine would yield a lifespan of 27.4 years, not months, years. Amazing.
There is still quite a lot yet to know, capacity by weight and volume, manufacturing complexity, voltage at full and declined charge and others. Those answers will come, but for now, this Cornell team has a team of tigers leashed up with everywhere to go. The battery chemistry competition is getting really interesting.
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