The key obstacle of lithium-sulfur batteries has been broken, and the capacity is three times that of ordinary lithium batteries
With the continuous development of electric vehicles, this has led to new energy vehicles receiving the attention of the majority of people and consumers. In recent days, scientists have seen the great potential of lithium-sulfur batteries, which is a different way of driving lithium batteries. It's a more environmentally friendly way to drive, thanks to the fact that they don't rely on expensive and hard-to-access raw materials, such as cobalt. However, due to problems such as stability, the development of this technology has so far hindered.
In order to promote the continuous development of new energy vehicles, engineers in the United States have continuously studied this and have made breakthrough progress in this research. According to U.S. foreign media reports, American scientists use a rare chemical substance of sulfur to prevent destructive chemical reactions in power batteries, which makes lithium-sulfur batteries closer to commercial use. The results of this research were recently published in the journal Communication Chemistry.
Compared with traditional ternary lithium batteries and lithium iron manganate batteries, lithium-sulfur batteries are more promising in terms of storage, not only due to the abundant sulfur reserves, but also compared with the cobalt, manganese and nickel used in today's batteries, the source of sulfur is not a problem. At the same time, lithium-sulfur batteries can also bring another significant performance improvement, its storage potential is several times that of lithium batteries.
But in fact, lithium-sulfur batteries also have certain troubles in the production process, which has plagued the majority of researchers, that is, the formation of polysulfides. When lithium-sulfur power batteries are working, these substances will enter the electrolyte and undergo a chemical reaction, which can damage the battery capacity and life health.
To overcome this challenge, the scientists replaced the carbonate electrolyte with an ether electrolyte that does not react with polysulfides. But this also poses other problems, as the ether electrolyte itself is extremely volatile and contains a low boiling point component, which means that if heated above room temperature, the battery may quickly fail or melt.
According to foreign media reports, the chemistry of this sulfur can only be observed at high temperatures in laboratories or in oil wells in nature. After a year of testing and 4000 charge and discharge cycles. Scientists have shown that this lithium-sulfur battery can be used for more than 10 years of routine use. The team believes that this battery has three times the capacity of lithium-ion batteries, paving the way for more environmentally friendly batteries, allowing electric vehicles to travel farther after each charge.