22 Years' Battery Customization
Dec 05, 2019 Pageview：2002
Recently, a piece of news detonated the technology circle, Huawei announced that its research institute has successfully developed a graphene lithium battery, and will soon be put into production. Although this kind of news can't be understood by many people from a technical point of view, it is not lacking in topicality, even like "The country is boiling! Today, Huawei has once again made the world dumbfounded." "Huawei just announced that the United States is panicking!” This kind of article has also begun to spread widely among friends. However, there are many people who sneer at this technology and think that Huawei is using this gimmick to market. So what is the truth about graphene batteries?
Huawei launches high temperature resistant long life graphene lithium battery
On December 1, Huawei's Central Research Institute Watt Lab announced at the 57th Japan Battery Conference that it will soon launch the industry's first graphene-based lithium-ion battery. This is the second time that Huawei has introduced new technologies at this conference. At the 56th Japan Battery Conference last year, Huawei demonstrated the super fast charging technology for lithium batteries. This new battery charging speed is the average mobile phone. 10 times, a 3000mAh battery can charge 48% of electricity in 5 minutes, charging speed is three or four times faster than the current mainstream. At the same time that Huawei showed a graphene-based lithium-ion battery, they also announced that they will launch a mobile phone equipped with a super fast charge within the year.
Therefore, the graphene-based lithium-ion battery displayed this year may take some time to be commercialized, but this does not affect our expectations for this battery technology. The biggest feature of this technology is that it can greatly improve the thermal stability and service life of the battery. It is necessary to know that the previous lithium battery is not only inefficient at high temperature, but also greatly reduces the life. The experimental results show that Huawei's new graphene-based high-temperature-resistant technology can increase the upper limit of lithium-ion battery use temperature by 10 °C, and the service life is twice that of ordinary lithium-ion batteries.
However, in the near future, the impact of this technology on mobile phones may not be very large. After all, the working temperature of mobile phones is over 40 degrees Celsius, and the high level is not only harmful to components, but also the heat dissipation system of mobile phones. The user will feel a noticeable burning sensation. However, Huawei said that the research results will bring innovation to the energy storage business of communication base stations. The service life of external base stations using the high-temperature lithium-ion batteries in hot regions such as Africa can reach more than four years. Graphene-based lithium-ion batteries are also of great use for electric vehicles and drones, as both often work in harsh working conditions.
Can graphene also be used as a battery? The Chinese Academy of Sciences tells you that it is possible
However, there are also many people who have doubts about Huawei's battery. How can graphene be used as an inactive material? Huawei actually said in the draft that this is a graphene-based lithium battery, not a graphene battery. Specifically, Huawei has transformed lithium batteries with the excellent properties of graphene.
It is understood that the principle of Huawei's graphene-based lithium-ion battery is to increase the thermal stability of the battery by adding a high-temperature anti-decomposition additive to the electrolyte and a large single-crystal positive electrode with high temperature stability. At the same time, graphene is used for efficient heat dissipation. The explanation given by Huawei is as follows: 1 Add special additives to the electrolyte to remove traces of water and avoid pyrolysis of the electrolyte; 2 The positive electrode of the battery is modified with large single crystal ternary materials to improve the thermal stability of the material. ; 3 using the new material graphene, can achieve efficient heat dissipation between the lithium-ion battery and the environment.
Therefore, Huawei's application of graphene is only added to the lithium battery as a medium, which plays a role in heat dissipation and life. If you say that the real all-graphene battery is too sci-fi, it doesn't mean it is impossible. A few days ago, the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a microblog, which published the peculiar electrical and optical properties of the two-dimensional graphene system. This news also attracted some users who did not know the truth to ridicule the Chinese Academy of Sciences Weibo, saying that Huawei Both are commercialized and the Chinese Academy of Sciences is still studying. However, the research on the photoelectric phenomenon of graphene in the Chinese Academy of Sciences is obviously not related to Huawei's graphene lithium battery. The specific process is not explained too much here.
Cost and physical properties are the biggest constraints for graphene lithium batteries
But is the graphene lithium battery really a revolutionary technology? It seems that it is still too early to say this. The biggest obstacle to the commercial use of graphene - cost, graphene is used in lithium batteries, replacing the past conductive carbon or graphite electrode, compared to the market price of hundreds of dollars per kilogram of graphene, these two tons sold It really counts as the price of cabbage, and hundreds of dollars is still "inferior quality", the price of real excellent graphene is as high as several thousand Yuan per gram. On the basis of the current battery, is the user willing to use such a high raw material price difference in exchange for the advantages of heat resistance improvement and life doubling? I am afraid not.
And if it is used as an electrode lithium intercalation material, the surface characteristics of graphene are easily affected by the outside world, and stability and other characteristics are difficult to meet the needs of lithium batteries. Even in physical properties, graphene is better than silicon, according to data given by researchers. If graphene replaces graphite, it can only achieve twice the performance improvement, but after switching to silicon, the lift is ten times.
Therefore, as a supplement to the traditional lithium battery, graphene is indeed much more advanced than the current technology, but subject to cost and its own characteristics, it is difficult to replace the traditional lithium battery in various fields from now on. In general, graphene lithium batteries are still a laboratory product, and in the laboratory, there have been a series of cool methods such as nanotechnology to improve thermal stability and longevity. Graphene is just one of them. The demand for graphene lithium batteries in the market and users is not urgent.
The broad prospects of graphene materials
But this does not mean that graphene technology is a flower. Graphene lithium batteries are only an attempt at this material. Perhaps graphene is not revolutionary in battery performance, but in other fields, graphene. The changes may be turned upside down, such as flexible device semiconductor displays, energy materials, super capacitors, high-speed transistors, optoelectronic devices, and so on.
But now researchers have not found that they can put the advantages of graphene into the largest field. Now people are looking at graphene materials. In fact, there is a kind of flower called the emperor, looking at such a good thing, but I don’t know how. Similar to graphene, there is also a “carbon nanotube” technology, which exhibits various excellent characteristics in the laboratory, but it is difficult to replace traditional materials and technologies due to cost and advantage.
This has also led to a new problem, even though the changes that graphene can bring to humans are not large, but the research institutes and universities are still rushing, why you can guess.
Therefore, instead of using new materials such as graphene to replace the traditional materials, it is better to make new innovations based on these materials and technologies, and then trigger revolutions such as energy and intelligent hardware, which may be the ultimate way out of these materials. But who has such a talent and who knows where he is now? What we can do with these spectators is only waiting, and the scientific leap will never be completed overnight.
The page contains the contents of the machine translation.
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