Recently, researchers at Japan's National Institute for Materials Science and Softbank have reportedly developed a rechargeable lithium-air battery, which they claim is much denser than traditional lithium-ion batteries.
Operating at room temperature, the energy density of such batteries is 500Wh/kg, which is about twice that of current lithium-ion batteries.
The battery relies on lithium as the negative electrode and oxygen as the positive porous carbon electrode, the stacking device of 10 batteries has a size of 4cm×5cm, and the electrode of the single-layer battery is 2cm×2cm.
"In a stacked battery configuration, oxygen needs to be transported horizontally in a gas diffusion layer, and then, oxygen needs to be further transported to the vertical direction to pass through the entire section of the positive electrode," the researchers said. ”
Due to their potential for high energy density, lithium-air batteries (LABs) are considered one of the many ways to improve today's energy storage technologies, but they inherently have inherent disadvantages such as low efficiency and poor cycle life.
The researchers note that although there have been many reports of LAB successfully running more than 100 cycles to achieve long charge/discharge, at the actual cell level, the estimated energy density is less than 50Wh/kg, compared to less than 20 cycles for LABs with an energy density of more than 300Wh/kg.
The emergence of new lithium-air batteries is expected to solve the problem of opposition between energy density and cycle times, and has a lot of use value in residential power storage systems, electric vehicles, drones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the future.