A new type of battery is 90% more efficient than a lithium battery

The battery is still a short board on mobile devices. At present, almost all smart phones are hard to escape the fate of a day. But at the same time, researchers are constantly exploring new possibilities for battery technology. Recently, scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a new type of lithium-air battery that is said to be 90% more energy efficient than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

Lithium-air batteries have been developed in 1995, and scientists at the University of Cambridge have found a way to improve the technology: they have produced a lithium iodide and water-based electrolyte. In a lithium-air battery reaction, hydrogen in water produces lithium hydroxide crystals together with lithium, while the graphene layer present at the same time collects the crystals through internal pores and makes them inert.

These crystals can cause problems when charging, but lithium iodide comes in handy. When electrons enter the cell, the iodide ions are converted to triiodide ions and combined with the hydroxide crystals to release the holes (as one of the benefits, the process requires much lower voltage than conventional lithium batteries).

The results that scientists have finally achieved are impressive: Cambridge's design is 90% more efficient than traditional lithium-ion batteries and can last more than 2,000 charge cycles. However, this technology is also difficult to commercialize. The batteries produced by the R&D team depend on a pure oxygen environment, so they predict that lithium-air batteries will be at least 10 years away from real applications. Although it sounds very far away, if you want to expand the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by three times, it will take 20 years. In contrast, Cambridge University research can bring even more significant achievements in a shorter period of time, which is really amazing.

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