Engineers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have announced the successful testing of an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with about four times the energy density of today’s lithium-ion batteries.
Energy density is defined as the amount of energy stored in a system per unit of volume.
“Our approach is a complete change from the current battery concept of two electrodes joined by a liquid electrolyte, which has been used over the last 150 to 200 years,” said ORNL scientist Chengdu Liang, lead author of a report on the battery tests published this week in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
The development of a long-lasting, commercially usable lithium-sulfur battery has eluded scientists for decades. The use of liquid electrolytes has proven to be a massive hurdle in the way of pursuing these super batteries. A liquid electrolyte helps to conduct ions through the battery by allowing lithium compounds to dissolve. However, the same dissolution process causes the battery to readily break down.
Instead of pursuing the liquid electrolyte route, the team decided to engineer groundbreaking sulfur-rich materials that conduct ions as well as those used in a conventional battery’s cathode. The ORNL team then combined the new cathode and a lithium anode with an ORNL-developed solid electrolyte material.
“This game-changing shift from liquid to solid electrolytes eliminates the problem of sulfur dissolution and enables us to deliver on the promise of lithium-sulfur batteries,” Liang said. “Our battery design has real potential to reduce cost, increase energy density and improve safety compared with existing lithium-ion technologies.”
To read more, click here.