With two battery packs of the same weight, one using Li-Ion technology, the other Li-Air, the latter is ten times more efficient, which would mean electric cars with maximum ranges similar to those of conventional engined cars.
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Researchers at the University of Cambridge on Thursday announced the creation of a laboratory demonstration model of a lithium-oxygen battery that overcomes numerous barriers that have held back the development of this technology.
Unfortunately, as expected with current battery experiments, the technology will not be immediately available in any industry and it could take up to 10 years for lithium-air batteries to equip devices.
Waterloo’s technology as it now stands enables a 40 to 60 per cent increase in energy density in lithium-ion batteries; which has major implications for everything from small consumer devices, to home battery systems and right through to electric vehicles.
Over the past decade, researchers have been developing various alternatives to Li-ion batteries, and lithium-air batteries are considered the ultimate in next-generation energy storage, due to their extremely high energy density.
“In their simplest form, batteries are made of three components: a positive electrode, a negative electrode and an electrolyte, ” says Dr. Tao Liu, also from the Department of Chemistry, and the paper’s first author. Other energy storage technologies the team is working on include metal-air batteries, lithium sulfur (Li-S) batteries and various types of flow batteries. The battery can be recharged more than 2000 times, which may be revolutionary for batteries as a whole.
The lithium-air batteries are described as the “ultimate” batteries because they propose a high theoretical energy density of up to ten times the energy offered by regular lithium-ion batteries, Phys.org reports.
The highly porous graphene electrode also greatly increases the capacity of the demonstrator, although only at certain rates of charge and discharge.
But problems have beset lithium-oxygen batteries that affect their capacity and lifetime, including troublesome efficiency, performance, chemical reaction and potential safety issues and the limitation of needing pure oxygen rather than plain old air. “But what we’ve seen here suggests that there are ways to solve these problems – maybe we’ve just got to look at things a little differently”. There’s also the problem of air, which contains nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapor in addition to the pure oxygen that the experimental cell requires.
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Intellectual property from the research is owned by Cambridge Enterprises, the university’s commercialization arm, and has been patented, Grey said.
