Breathing Battery' Advance Holds Promise For Long-Range Electric Cars

Breathing battery advance holds
promise for long-range electric cars

New materials make prototype lithiumair batteries more durable.
Philip Ball
29 October 2015
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If electric vehicles are ever going to match the range of cars that run on fossil
fuels, their batteries will need to store a lot more energy. Lithiumair (or
lithiumoxygen) batteries are among the best candidates, but have been held
back by serious obstacles. But a more durable design unveiled by chemists at
the University of Cambridge, UK, offers promise that these problems can be
overcome.
The batteries devised by Clare Grey at Cambridge and her co-workers are small
laboratory prototypes a long way from a car battery pack but their
innovative combination of materials addresses several major problems with
the lithiumoxygen technology, says Yury Gogotsi, a materials chemist at
Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The work, reported today in Science1, certainly looks interesting, Gogotsi says,
but he cautions that it is still just good science lab work on a small cell,
and not yet close to a marketable technology.
Breathing batteries
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Lithiumair batteries, also known as breathing batteries, harness the energy
produced when lithium metal reacts with oxygen from the air. Because they do
not have to carry around one of their main ingredients (oxygen), and because
lithium metal has a low density, they can in theory store as much energy
per kilogram as a petrol engine. That means that the batteries might stuff in
energy ten times more densely than the best battery packs in current electric
cars, which researchers hope might let vehicles travel as far as 800 kilometres
before they need recharging2.
Despite this promise, some chemists have abandoned hope of getting breathing
batteries to work. Although the lithiumair battery has a high theoretical
energy-storage capacity, in practice it is very difficult to achieve, admits Grey.
The main problem is that chemical reactions produce unwanted side products
that clog the electrodes, destroy the battery materials or short-circuit the
device. As a result, the batteries typically fail after a few dozen charge
discharge cycles3.
But Grey and her team have introduced a bundle of innovations that make
their design more durable.
In the battery, lithium ions are released from a lithium-metal negative
electrode, the anode, and flow in an electrolyte to a carbon-based positive
electrode, the cathode. Electric current is generated because, at the same time,
electrons flow around a closed circuit from the anode to the cathode.
In the teams prototype, the electrolyte is an organic solvent called
dimethoxyethane, mixed with the salt lithium iodide. With these ingredients,
when the ions react with oxygen at the cathode, they produce crystals of
lithium hydroxide. Many earlier battery designs instead produced lithium
peroxide, a white solid that built up on the electrode and was hard to remove
during battery recharge. Lithium hydroxide, by contrast, decomposes readily
when the battery is recharged.
Adapted from Tao Liu, Gabriella Bocchetti and Clare P. Grey
Stable design
One problem with some earlier designs was that the highly reactive lithium
metal reacted with and destroyed the electrolyte, and the products of that
reaction coated and inactivated the lithium anode. That does not seem to
happen with Greys battery. As a result, says Grey, the cells work for hundreds
of cycles, with only a slight decrease in performance. She estimates that her
teams cells could store at least five times more energy per kilogram than the
lithium-ion batteries used in some of todays electric cars such as those
made by Tesla Motors of Palo Alto, California.
Another innovation of the cells is the material used for the cathode. Many
previous lithiumair batteries have used various forms of porous carbon, but
those made by Grey and her colleagues contain a relatively new variant, called
reduced graphene oxide: sheets of pure carbon one atom thick, stripped from
graphite with the help of a chemical process of oxidation and then reduced
back to carbon in a highly porous form.
Reduced graphene oxide electrodes are resilient, says Gogotsi, which probably
contributes to the batterys good performance over many chargedischarge
cycles. However, he adds, there is no reason to believe that the ideal electrode
architecture has yet been found.
As far as Im aware, this is the first time this particular combination of
materials has been studied, says Jake Christensen, a lithiumair battery
specialist with the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto. But he
points to several problems for commercialization. In particular, the battery
delivers current at densities some 2050 times lower than a car would need, he
says. Our best performances are obtained with very low current densities,
Grey admits, so we are very far off the numbers needed for a car battery. If it
can be made to work, the technology's first use would likely be as rechargeable
batteries that aren't intended for battery packs in cars,

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Breathing Battery' Advance Holds Promise For Long-Range Electric Cars

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Breathing battery advance holds

promise for long-range electric cars

Liquid-metal batteries get boost from molten lead

The rechargeable revolution: A better battery

Cheap battery stores energy for a rainy day

More related stories

Adapted from Tao Liu, Gabriella Bocchetti and Clare P. Grey

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