Graphene is considered one of the most promising materials of the future.

In the consumer electronics field, battery capacity and charging speed have always been a constant topic. Many manufacturers have used charging time and battery capacity as product gimmicks. Looking at the global electronics market, lithium-ion batteries, which have been around for years, are still the world's biggest players, with the battery built into almost all smartphones, and even Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has plenty of lithium-ion batteries.

However, the huge shortage of lithium batteries in terms of safety, endurance, environmental pollution, and charging speed has begun to severely limit the development of major high-tech industries. As a result, many corporate R&D departments have focused on the more advanced "graphene batteries" and believe that this new type of battery will completely replace lithium batteries that have been available for more than 26 years in the future.

What's a graphene battery?

Graphene is a planar film with a hexagonal Honeycomb lattice composed of carbon atoms with SP2 hybrid orbits, and a two-dimensional material with only one carbon atom thickness. Graphene is currently the thinnest but hardest nanomaterials in the world. It is almost completely transparent and absorbs only 2.3 % of light. It is also the material with the smallest resistivity in the world.

The so-called graphene battery is a new energy battery developed using the characteristics of rapid and massive travel of lithium ions between the graphene surface and the electrode. As one of the thinnest, hardest, and most electrically conductive new nanomaterials, the concept of graphene has been attracting attention since its inception in 2004.

In the field of power cells, graphene is a positive and negative material for lithium-ion batteries with good application prospects. At the same time, graphene polymer batteries weigh only 50 % of conventional batteries and will cost 77 % less than lithium batteries. From the performance point of view, graphene lithium batteries are charged once and take no more than 10 minutes.

Because of its unique characteristics, graphene is called "magical material" and scientists even predicted that it will "completely change the 21st century."

Ideal is beautiful.

As we all know, the most used battery material in the smartphone field is still lithium batteries. Lithium batteries were first used for commercial use in 1991 and have since become standard equipment. However, many people think that this technology has reached its limit and hopes to find alternative sources, so graphene battery technology has entered people's eyes.

Current news suggests that Samsung's next-generation flagship Galaxy S9 will use graphene batteries instead of existing lithium-ion batteries. The battery storage capacity of this type of battery at the same volume is about 45 % of that of a lithium battery, but it can be fully charged within 12 minutes and can maintain high stability in an environment up to 60 degrees Celsius. This makes this material battery very suitable not only for smartphones, but also for electric vehicles.

It is reported that the Samsung research institute has found a way to combine graphene with silica on a large scale. The material that completes the fusion is called a "graphene ball" and has a structure similar to popcorn. The researchers pointed out that this technology not only improves the stability of the battery, but also improves the conductivity, "greatly improving the recyclability and rapid charging ability of the cathode." More importantly, their energy density is close to 800 Wh/L, which is about the same as the lithium ion battery used by Tesla.

According to outside analysis, if Samsung is the first company in the world to successfully put graphene batteries into mass production equipment, it will make the Korean company an exclusive supplier or patent holder of graphene materials for a long time. And that will go a long way towards improving the company's revenue and global standing.

At the same time, the concept of "graphene batteries" has also been repeatedly mentioned in the field of new energy vehicles, and it seems to have become a breakthrough in the technology of electric vehicle batteries. Graphene technology batteries are known as "milestone black technology" and claim to extend the range of electric vehicles, battery life, and shorten the charging time.

Perhaps the most representative of these is the Fisk EMotion electric vehicle developed by Henry Fisk, founder of Fisk. FiskerEMion will use new graphene battery materials, which can travel 208 kilometers in nine minutes, with a maximum range of 644 kilometers and a maximum speed of 259 kilometers per hour. The car is expected to be the first to be sold in the United Kingdom in 2020.

In addition, local media reported that scientists at Zhejiang University have developed a new type of aluminum-graphene battery using graphene membrane as a positive material. This battery has an extremely long life, can be fully charged in a very short period of time, and can work normally within the temperature range of minus 40 °C to 120 °C.

Moreover, the aluminum-graphene batteries developed this time have some of the most unmatched features of other current batteries. For example, at a low temperature of minus 40 °C, aluminum-graphene batteries can still be steadily charged and discharged 1,000 times; At a high temperature of 100 °C, it has been steadily charged and discharged 45,000 times. Even if the core is exposed to Yuhuoyan, it will not catch fire or explode. This wide temperature range lays the foundation for the future use of aluminum ion batteries under extreme temperature conditions.

In addition, the battery is also very flexible, and the capacity can remain unchanged after 10,000 bends, demonstrating the application potential in wearable flexible electronic devices.

Reality is very bony.

The current capital market has a huge imagination for graphene batteries, but many scholars believe that graphene batteries are currently difficult to break through in many aspects of technology, so it is still a product in the laboratory, and its true mass production is still far away..

In an interview with the Daily Economic News, Dr. Liuguanwei of Tsinghua University, a senior engineer at the Beijing Institute of Nonferrous Metals Research, said: "There are differences in how to define graphene batteries in the first place: the addition of graphene materials to electrode materials. The definition of graphene batteries is misleading. The news about graphene batteries is limited to some fur reports. There is no schematic diagram of the structure and reaction mechanism of the battery, nor is there any specific technical parameters such as energy density, voltage, and cycle life. For the battery industry, without this information, the news reported lacks the most basic credibility, and the possibility of false exaggeration of propaganda is great. "

Liyongfeng, a professor at China Petroleum University, is also sceptical. He believes that the current application of graphene in batteries is mainly combined with Silicon in the negative electrode of the battery to replace the original graphite, which can increase the overall capacity and charging speed of the battery, but the performance improvement is limited. Online rumors of subversive ascension are not very realistic. In addition, some industry insiders mentioned that the surface characteristics of graphene are greatly affected by the chemical state, and that batch stability, cycle life and other issues are also difficult to meet the detailed requirements of lithium battery production.

CITIC's report also shows that it is still unknown when graphene products with excellent properties can walk out of the laboratory. For example, when graphene is used as a transparent conductive membrane, there is a certain bottleneck in the preparation of its industrial products, making it impossible for the low conductivity of graphene crude oil in the product to play. Since single-layer graphene has no bandgap and can not achieve the transistor switching functions necessary for logical circuits, the degree of process complexity has greatly increased, so its widespread use in the field of Microelectronics will take time.

It is true that graphene is considered to be one of the most promising materials in the future, but as far as it is concerned, its foam composition is greater than the actual application value, and there are many factors that hinder the popularization of this material. The mass production and cost are the most important. The barriers to popularity, Graphene batteries may have a long way to go before they completely replace lithium batteries.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.