Aluminum battery research breakthrough: more than 7,500 times rechargeable lithium battery

Aluminum is considered an attractive battery material, but commercially viable aluminum cells have not yet come out. A Chinese-based research group at Stanford University in the United States published a research report in the online version of Nature on the 6th. The latest aluminum cell developed by the research team is characterized by its high efficiency, durability, low charge, low flammability, and low cost. Regular replacement battery safety.

For a long time, no major breakthrough in aluminum battery research is the main problem of battery materials. Proper anode materials and electrolyte materials are the keys to ensuring that the battery will operate after repeated cycles of charging and discharging. Dai Hongjie, a research team leader and professor of Chinese at Stanford University, told Xinhua News Agency reporters that they used graphite as the negative electrode material and tested several well-behaved graphite materials and used a plasma equivalent of salt solution as the electrolyte , Thus solving the aluminum bottleneck problem in materials research.

The researchers made a new aluminum cell by placing a positive electrode made of aluminum, a negative electrode made of graphite, and a plasma electrolyte in a soft-pack of aluminum foil with a polymer coating. Dai Hongjie said that they developed the aluminum ion battery can charge and discharge, with ultra-fast charging, easy to burn explosion, folding, material advantages of low cost. "This is a major breakthrough in the development of rechargeable aluminum batteries, as previously available rechargeable aluminum batteries were basically non-existent, especially aluminum batteries with these properties," he said.

The researchers said that because the plasma electrolyte will not burn, aluminum and graphite are not flammable, so this aluminum battery is very safe. The research report shows that to test the safety of aluminum batteries, researchers drilled the batteries, the batteries did not explode and burned, and were still running for some time.

In addition to high safety, aluminum batteries incorporating new technologies also make important breakthroughs in performance. For example, aluminum batteries can be recharged in just about a minute. In the experiment, aluminum battery after more than 7500 charge and discharge cycles, the capacitance is not lost. In contrast, aluminum cells from other research institutes are usually unusable after about 100 cycles, while Lithium Batteries can only withstand about 1,000 cycles. In addition, aluminum and graphite are flexible materials that allow aluminum cells to bend and fold without compromising performance.

Dai Hongjie said that they developed the aluminum battery can replace the easy to pollute the environment of alkaline batteries and lithium-ion batteries with flammable risk. The future of this aluminum battery can also be used to store renewable energy in the grid can also be used for electric vehicles. However, the current aluminum battery technology remains to be further improved, such as the need to increase the energy density of aluminum batteries.