Engineers at Cornell University have developed a new lithium battery that charges in five minutes, faster than any similar battery on the market, while maintaining stable performance over long charge and discharge cycles. This breakthrough could alleviate the "range anxiety" of drivers who worry that electric vehicles cannot travel long distances without taking up time to recharge.
"Range anxiety is a bigger barrier to transportation electrification than other barriers, such as battery cost and performance," said Lynden Archer, an engineering professor and dean of Cornell University's School of Engineering who is overseeing the project. "If you can charge an electric vehicle battery in five minutes, you no longer need a 300-mile range battery, you can choose a smaller battery, which can reduce the cost of electric vehicles and enable wider adoption."
The team's paper was recently published in the journal Joule. The first author of the paper is Jin Shuo, a doctoral student majoring in chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Lithium-ion batteries are one of the most commonly used power units in electric vehicles and smartphones. The batteries are lightweight, reliable and relatively energy efficient. However, they take hours to charge and lack the ability to handle large current surges.
Researchers have discovered that indium is a particularly promising material for fast-charging batteries. Indium is a soft metal primarily used in the manufacture of indium tin oxide coatings for touch screen displays and solar panels.
New research shows that indium has two key characteristics as a battery anode: an extremely low migration energy barrier, which determines the diffusion speed of ions in the solid state, and a moderate exchange current density, which is related to the reduction speed of ions in the anode. The combination of these two properties, fast diffusion and slow surface reaction kinetics, is crucial for fast charging and long-term storage.
"The key innovation is that we discovered a design principle that allows the metal ions on the battery anode to move freely and find the right configuration before participating in the charge storage reaction," Archer said. "The end result is that the electrodes are in a stable morphological state during each charge cycle. This is why our new fast-charging batteries are able to charge and discharge over and over again for thousands of cycles."
This technology, combined with wireless inductive charging on the road, will reduce the size and cost of batteries, making electric transportation a more viable option for drivers.
However, this does not mean that indium anodes are perfect or even practical. "While this result is exciting because it tells us how to get fast-charging batteries, indium is heavy," Archer said. "This provides an opportunity for computational chemistry modeling, perhaps using generative artificial intelligence tools, to understand what other lightweight materials have the same chemistry." Such a low Damkler number. For example, are there metal alloys that we have never studied that have the required properties? This is where I feel comfortable that there is a general principle at work that allows anyone to design better battery anodes that achieve faster charging rates than the state-of-the-art."
Compiled source: ScitechDaily