Lithium-ion batteries are the core of a variety of devices, including smart phones, notebook computers, and increasingly electric vehicles. So many researchers are interested in using advanced materials to improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries, making them lighter, more compact, and capable of storing more energy. A new tin-aluminum alloy developed by engineers in Texas may play a role in three aspects, and at the same time may even make it faster and lower production costs.
Over the years, mass-produced lithium-ion batteries rely on graphite and copper as their anodes. For years, researchers have been looking for alternative materials that can overcome the limitations of these materials, including high-cost production and limited storage capacity (for example, silicon can store 10 times more energy, although it constitutes another series of problems).
Creating the current anode is a laborious multi-step process in which graphite is coated on the copper foil. However, as explained by Karl Kreder, materials scientist and lead author of the new study at the University of Texas at Austin, this can lead to inefficiencies in terms of manufacturing processes and the battery itself.
Kreder said: "So the active material (graphite) is coated on top of an inert current collector (copper). This increases the volume of the system and the quality of the non-active material. By combining the current collector with the active material, higher capacity can be used. Active material, while using less inactive current collector material."
Kreder and his team achieved this through a simplified manufacturing method that eliminated the cumbersome coating process. When tin is cast into blocks, tin can be added directly to aluminum to form an alloy, which can then be rolled mechanically (relatively inexpensive and ordinary metallurgical alloying processes) into nanostructured metal foil. In the final step, the reduction of particles in the material is crucial.
Kreder explained: “Tin can be alloyed with lithium. Unfortunately, if tin foil or even micron-sized tin particles are used, tin will break when cycling through volume expansion due to volume expansion, which means that if you use a large The tin pellets can only maintain dozens of cycles of charge and discharge, but if nanoscale tin pellets are produced, the pellets will not split during the alloying process."
Researchers referred to the resulting material as a cross-eutectic alloy (IdEA) anode, which they believe is only one-fourth the thickness of traditional anode materials and weighs only half as much as traditional materials. They tested this anode material in a small lithium-ion battery and then charged and discharged it to measure performance. They found that this anode has twice the capacity of traditional copper-graphite anodes.
Claude said: "The reason for doing so is very good. One of the elements is active, tin, and the other is inert, aluminum. "Aluminum creates a conductive substrate in which tin is held and aluminum is provided. Structure and conductivity, while tin alloys with lithium and de-alloys when the battery is cycled.
One of the team's heads, Arumugam Manthiram, director of the Texas Materials Research Institute, said: “The ability to develop a cheap, scalable electrode nanomaterial manufacturing process is truly exciting. Our results show that This material has succeeded in the performance indicators required for the commercialization of lithium-ion batteries."
The research was published in the ACS Energy Letters magazine.
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