As an enormous potential lithium ion battery, the energy storage of Li-S each unit is five times of the weight. However it owns short life. The good news is Journal <Science Advances> reports: A research team lead by Doctor Mahdokht Shaibani from Monash University Australia already found stable enough new Li-S battery structure, which get prospect in improving battery life of smart phone to five days.
By report, the new structure could give Lithium-sulfur battery unprecedented charge discharge efficiency, so it will improve typical battery life of smart phone to a few days. Dr. Mahdokht Shaibani said” what irony is it is very hard to handle the intense pressure when large-scale applications due to the capacity of sulfur electrode is too large. It causes breaking easily. The transformation and joint failure of key components caused by stress, that is carbon substrate that transfer electron to insulated sulfur and polymer binder binding the two materials, will lead to rapid decay of battery performance.
Given this situation, Shaibani cooperate with an international research team to find more stable joint method for the two materials. What interesting is she didn’t tend to bind the materials and form dense networks, however is “giving sulfur particle some breathing room”
As the picture shows, the new structure of Li-S battery still reply on tradtional binder, however uses a different processing to form super strong bridge between carbon substrate and sulfur particles, which could provide extra space when battery expand at charing.
In other words, the research team creates a similar network, however just put minimum binder bewteen adjacent particles, so increase space of accommodating structural change and stress.
In over 200 time cyclic intial experiments, the new Li-S battery structure show a hope that the charge discharge rate is over 99%. As we known, the high capacity electroide is not existed before.
The research team said, the new battery may last for five day on smart phone, or 1000 kilometer drive for electric car. The follow-up plan is to expand experiments to discove the prospect of EV powder battery or solar battery.
The research was published on <Science Advance> recently. The original Title is <Expansion-tolerance architectures for stable cycyling of ultrahigh-loading sulfur cathode in lithium-sulfur batteries>