Skip to main content

Nano tubes may give the world better batteries

Scientists' method quenches lithium metal dendrites in batteries that charge faster, last longer

Date:
October 25, 2018
Source:
Rice University
Summary:
Scientists use thin films of multi walled carbon nano tubes to keep lithium metal from sprouting dendrites, tentacle-like growths that can cause batteries to fail. The strategy could be key to developing batteries that hold more energy and charge faster than current, ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries.
Rice University scientists are counting on films of carbon nano tubes to make high-powered, fast-charging lithium metal batteries a logical replacement for common lithium-ion batteries.
The Rice lab of chemist James Tour showed thin nano tube films effectively stop dendrites that grow naturally from unprotected lithium metal anodes in batteries. Over time, these tentacle-like dendrites can pierce the battery's electrolyte core and reach the cathode, causing the battery to fail.
That problem has both dampened the use of lithium metal in commercial applications and encouraged researchers worldwide to solve it.
Lithium metal charges much faster and holds about 10 times more energy by volume than the lithium-ion electrodes found in just about every electronic device, including cellphones and electric cars.
"One of the ways to slow dendrites in lithium-ion batteries is to limit how fast they charge," Tour said. "People don't like that. They want to be able to charge their batteries quickly."The Rice team's answer, detailed in Advanced Materials, is simple, inexpensive and highly effective at stopping dendrite growth, Tour said.
"What we've done turns out to be really easy," he said. "You just coat a lithium metal foil with a multi walled carbon nano tube film. The lithium dopes the nano tube film, which turns from black to red, and the film in turn diffuses the lithium ions."
"Physical contact with lithium metal reduces the nano tube film, but balances it by adding lithium ions," said Rice postdoctoral researcher Rodrigo Salvatierra, co-lead author of the paper with graduate student Gladys López-Silva. "The ions distribute themselves throughout the nano tube film."
When the battery is in use, the film discharges stored ions and the underlying lithium anode refills it, maintaining the film's ability to stop dendrite growth.
The tangled-nano tube film effectively quenched dendrites over 580 charge/discharge cycles of a test battery with a sulfurised-carbon cathode the lab developed in previous experiments. The researchers reported the full lithium metal cells retained 99.8 percent of their coulombic efficiency, the measure of how well electrons move within an electrochemical system.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Rice University. Original written by Mike Williams. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home births as safe as hospital births: International study suggests

A large international study led by McMaster University shows that low risk pregnant women who intend to give birth at home have no increased chance of the baby's perinatal or neonatal death compared to other low risk women who intend to give birth in a hospital. The results have been published by  The Lancet 's  EClinicalMedicine  journal. "More women in well-resourced countries are choosing birth at home, but concerns have persisted about their safety," said Eileen Hutton, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at McMaster, founding director of the McMaster Midwifery Research Centre and first author of the paper. "This research clearly demonstrates the risk is no different when the birth is intended to be at home or in hospital." The study examined the safety of place of birth by reporting on the risk of death at the time of birth or within the first four weeks, and found no clinically important or statistically different risk between home...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang

Dark matter, which researchers believe make up about 80% of the universe's mass, is one of the most elusive mysteries in modern physics. What exactly it is and how it came to be is a mystery, but a new Johns Hopkins University study now suggests that dark matter may have existed before the Big Bang. The study, published August 7 in  Physical Review Letters , presents a new idea of how dark matter was born and how to identify it with astronomical observations. "The study revealed a new connection between particle physics and astronomy. If dark matter consists of new particles that were born before the Big Bang, they affect the way galaxies are distributed in the sky in a unique way. This connection may be used to reveal their identity and make conclusions about the times before the Big Bang too," says Tommi Tenkanen, a postdoctoral fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and the study's author. While not much is known about its origins,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientists challenge notion of binary sexuality with naming of new plant species

A collaborative team of scientists from the US and Australia has named a new plant species from the remote Outback. Bucknell University biology postdoctoral fellow Angela McDonnell and professor Chris Martine led the description of the plant that had confounded field biologists for decades because of the unusual fluidity of its flower form. The discovery, published in the open access journal  PhytoKeys , offers a powerful example of the diversity of sexual forms found among plants. The new species of bush tomato discovered in remote Australia provides a compelling example of the fact that sexuality among Earth's living creatures is far more diverse -- and interesting -- than many people likely realize. Bucknell University postdoctoral fellow Angela McDonnell and biology professor Chris Martine led the study following an expedition last year to relocate populations of the new plant, which were first noted by Australian botanists during the 1970s. Herbarium specimens from th...
Post a Comment
Read more