New Lithium Batteries Will RunTen Times Longer and Charge Faster
While gadgets improve by leaps and bounds every year,the technology that powers them hasn’t.Batteries still suck,unless something comes of this research at Northwestern University that promises new lithium-ion alternatives that charge ten times faster with ten times the capacity.The lithium batteries based on the new technology may come to the market within three to five years.In future,mobile phone batteries could hold ten times more charge than the current lot of handsets.Researchers of Northwestern University,USA,have invented the new Li-ion battery,which they say would help future mobile phones to get charged faster than today’s handsets.
“We have found a way to extend a new lithium-ion battery‘s charge life by 10 times,”said Harold H Kung,a member of the research team and the lead author of the research paper.”Even after 150 charges,which would be one year or more of operation,the battery will be five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries available in the market today,” Kung added.Actually,there are numerous graphene layers in Li-ion batteries,which are filled by Lithium ions.So when users charge these batteries,atoms move towards the edge of the sheet to make room for more ions.The speed of recharging becomes less if these ions cannot quickly go from layer to layer.
Inside a battery,lithium ions travel between an anode and a cathode,passing through an electrolyte in the process.During charging,the speed at which those ions can get from the electrolyte to the anode affects how quickly a battery can be replenished.The ions have to pass between layers of thin graphene sheets,but in order to do so they must travel all the way to the edges first.This ends up creating mini ionic traffic jams,slowing down the charging process.So to improve this,the engineers used a chemical oxidation process to punch miniscule holes in the graphene sheets,essentially giving lithium battery a shortcut to the anode.
The same technique was adopted by the Northwestern University researchers.They populated the area between two graphene sheets in Li-ion battery with Silicon nanoclusters.In this manner,the number of ions that can live in the battery increases greatly-as a result,the charge capacity is improved greatly.The research lab took the process one step further by making perforations in the graphene sheets,which made sure the ions found a shortcut to the next layer much more easily.The researchers say the technology may make its way to the market within three to five years.
To increase the capacity of a ni-mh battery,the team also sandwiched clusters of silicon between those graphene sheets.In a traditional battery carbon is used,which can only accommodate one lithium atom for every six carbon atoms. But for every silicon atom, four lithium atoms can be accommodated,which drastically increases a battery’s capacity.And by sandwiching the silicon between the flexible graphene sheets,they also found a way to deal with silicon’s tendency to expand and contract which has traditionally made it impractical for use in batteries.
Article From: http://www.batteryfaq.net/battery-news/new-lithium-batteries-will-runten-times-longer-and-charge-faster-1756.html
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