As electric vehicles grow in popularity, the spotlight shines brighter on some of their remaining major issues. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are tackling two of the biggest challenges facing electric vehicles: limited range and slow charging.
Researchers have fabricated a new type of electrode for lithium-ion batteries that could release greater power and charge faster. They did this by creating thicker electrodes – the positively and negatively charged parts of the battery that power a device – using magnets to create a unique alignment that avoids common problems associated with sizing these critical components.
The result is an electrode that could potentially facilitate twice the range on a single charge for an electric vehicle, compared to a battery using an existing commercial electrode.
“Two-dimensional materials are generally considered a promising candidate for high-speed energy storage applications, as they only need several nanometers in thickness for fast charge transport,” said Guihua Yu, Professor at the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin and in Texas. Materials Institute. “However, for next-generation high-energy batteries based on thick electrode design, re-stacking nanosheets as building blocks can cause significant bottlenecks in charge transport, making it difficult to obtaining both high energy and fast charging.”
The key to discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses thin two-dimensional materials as the building blocks of the electrode, stacking them to create thickness, and then using a magnetic field to manipulate their orientations. The research team used commercially available magnets during the manufacturing process to arrange the two-dimensional materials in vertical alignment, creating a fast pathway for ions to pass through the electrode.
Typically, thicker electrodes force ions to travel longer distances to move through the battery, slowing charge time. The typical horizontal alignment of the layers of material that make up the electrode forces the ions to meander back and forth.
“Our electrode exhibits superior electrochemical performance partly due to high mechanical strength, high electrical conductivity, and facilitated lithium-ion transport due to the unique architecture we designed,” said Zhengyu Ju, a graduate student of Yu’s research group leading this project. .
In addition to comparing their electrode with a commercial electrode, they also fabricated a horizontally arranged electrode using the same materials for experimental control purposes. They were able to recharge the thick vertical electrode to 50% energy in 30 minutes, compared to 2 hours and 30 minutes with the horizontal electrode.
The researchers stressed that they were at the beginning of their work in this area. They only looked at one type of battery electrode in this research.
Their objective is to generalize their methodology of electrode layers organized vertically to apply it to different types of electrodes using other materials. This could help the technique be more widely adopted in industry, so it could enable future fast-charging but high-energy batteries that power electric vehicles.
The research team includes, from the University of Texas at Austin: Yu, Ju, Xiao Xu, Xiao Zhang, and Kasun U. Raigama; and from Stony Brook/Brookhaven National Laboratory: Steven T. King, Kenneth J. Takeuchi, Amy C. Marschilok, Lei Wang, and Esther S. Takeuchi. The research was funded by the US Department of Energy through the multi-institutional research facility Energy Frontier, the Center for Mesoscale Transport Properties.
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Material provided by University of Texas at Austin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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