Lithium battery is about to enter a new era

Many people may not be too clear about what is a lithium battery, which is widely used in notebooks, electric cars and mobile phones. Previously, lithium batteries have faced bottlenecks of long charging time and short service life for a long time. However, this bottleneck has recently been broken by a research team in Singapore, and as a result, a new era of lithium batteries is coming.

The new fast-charging battery can charge 70% in 2 minutes and has a service life of up to 20 years, which is 10 times the current battery life.

The lithium battery is mainly composed of a positive electrode material (such as lithium cobalt oxide), an electrolyte, and a negative electrode material (such as graphite). When charging, lithium ions are extracted from the lithium cobalt oxide crystal lattice of the positive electrode material, and are embedded in the layered graphite after passing through the electrolyte; when discharging, lithium ions are extracted from the lattice of the layered graphite, and are embedded in the electrolyte through the electrolyte lithium cobalt oxide.

During the charging and discharging of the battery, lithium ions are transferred back and forth between the positive electrode and the negative electrode, so the lithium battery is also referred to as a "rocking chair battery". In recent years, scientists have developed a new type of lithium battery, especially high-capacity lithium-sulfur, lithium-oxygen battery and nano-silicon battery. However, due to complicated synthesis process, high cost, short cycle life, etc., many results failed. Get popular.

The traditional lithium-ion battery cannot be quickly charged, mainly limited by the safety performance of the graphite electrode, and the battery will form a solid electrolyte membrane on the surface of the electrode, which blocks the "step" of lithium ions, thereby slowing down the lithium ion transportation speed. The innovation of the newly invented new lithium battery is that it uses an ultra-long titanium dioxide nanotube gel instead of a conventional graphite material as the battery negative. This new material does not form an electrolyte membrane, and lithium ions can be rapidly embedded to achieve a fast charging effect.

At the same time, thanks to the special structure of the one-dimensional titanium dioxide nanogel, the new battery achieves a breakthrough in life, and the number of cycles can reach tens of thousands of times. Assuming a charge once a day, it can be used for more than 20 years. Moreover, the titanium dioxide (commonly known as titanium dioxide) used in this research is low in cost and easy to process, has good battery repeatability, high reliability, and can be seamlessly integrated with existing processes, and its industrial application prospect is very bright.

Lithium batteries appeared in the 1970s. In 1991, Sony released its first commercial lithium battery, which has since revolutionized the face of consumer electronics. Despite the increasing use of lithium batteries, their endurance and service life have not been effectively broken, which has also constrained the rapid development of electric vehicles and other industries.

This new technological breakthrough will bring wide impact to many fields. In the field of mobile devices, new batteries can avoid the “forced elimination” of some electronic devices; the electric vehicle field will also benefit greatly, not only the charging time can be The hour is shortened to a few minutes, and the user does not need to frequently replace the expensive battery pack (costing about 10,000 US dollars), which brings benefits to the further popularization of electric vehicles.

However, a bottleneck faced by the current development of lithium batteries is that if you want to increase the capacity, it is necessary to sacrifice the charging speed and cycle life, and it is difficult to maintain a high capacity by increasing the charging speed. In the future, the replacement of batteries, on the one hand, needs to improve safety performance, such as the study of solid semi-solid electrolytes. On the other hand, it is necessary to accelerate the research and development of large-capacity anode materials to realize the breakthrough in energy density of lithium batteries.

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