Why didn't the graphene battery become the electric car battery?

Graphene has been hailed as the "king of new materials" by researchers and various media. It is a new type of nanometer materials known to be of high strength, good toughness, light weight, high light transmittance and good electrical conductivity.

Graphene polymer batteries, which are full of light, have the advantages of high specific energy and fast charging rate, which are exactly the pain points of today's electric cars. As early as 2015, HUAWEI watt laboratory announced a fast charging technology at the 56th Japan battery conference in Japan. This 3000mAh graphene battery can get up to 48% of the power in just 5 minutes.

What's more, as early as 2014, Graphenano of Spain cooperated with CORVADO University co-developed the first graphene polymeric material battery.

According to them, this battery has many advantages:

1. The specific energy of a graphene battery exceeds 600wh/kg, storage battery is three times as the market was the best product, the performance on today can be a crush situation (such as BYD at present Lithium-iron phosphate batteries Monomer energy density is 150 ~ 160wh/kg, Tesla's latest 21700 battery system of energy density in 300wh/kg);

2. The single range can be as high as 1000 km;

3. A single full charge only 8 minutes;

4. The service life is four times the size of the traditional hydride battery, The lithium battery twice;

5. Weight is half that of conventional batteries;

6. Graphenano says the battery costs 77 percent less than lithium.

From a laboratory perspective, these data are not very doubtful, because graphene batteries are also known as "money-spinning tools" or "paper tools". If you don't believe me, go to the university and you’ll know. It is very easy to write articles on this subject. However, when it comes to the practical stage, everyone loses their voice.

To see if this is deliberately demeaning to graphene batteries, the method is simple. For example, it has been 4 years since Graphenano Company came into view.

Look from its website, is based on the latest news for national conference or the application of graphene in other products, such as dental products).Don't lay wide electric car market, make medical supplies of money, or head are crazy, or we over-estimate their products.

In fact for the applications of graphene in battery, mainly combined with silicon, the so-called graphene battery, or essentially belongs to the lithium battery. For Lithium ion batteries, graphene as a carbon negative electrode material, there is no way to fundamentally change the lithium ion battery energy than an order of magnitude.

Inside the battery cathode instead of graphite, although can enhance the overall capacity of the battery and charging speed, but the effect of performance improvement is limited, and not to mentioned above to be strong.

This is not the main reason why graphene batteries are not on the market. The main reason for the difficulties in mass production lies in the inside.

1. The graphene battery costs is very high, and the preparation is difficult, almost not energy production. Now some surprising figures released by the basic come from the high purity of graphene batteries, appear only in the concept phase or laboratory;

2. "doped graphene battery" is the function of conductive agent on lithium battery or lithium electrode embedded materials, but with the traditional conductive carbon and graphite low cost compared to the former bring performance improvement is not enough to attract all the manufacturers;

(3) Graphene material itself has high specific surface area and other properties, which are incompatible with the current technical system of lithium ion battery industry.

4. in addition, such as the impact of other materials (such as silicon on do the cathode has a higher theoretical capacity) and dispersion process difficulty is high, holding it in the application of lithium batteries.

In conclusion, the first thing to note is that replacing lithium batteries with graphene batteries is basically impossible in the short to medium term; "Doped graphene lithium battery" has certain application prospects, but the effect is not big enough to shake the current pattern.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.