
Battery Week: everything in one place
All the pods and pieces on lithium-ion batteries.
As you might have gathered from the name, when Battery Week began … a month ago, I did not anticipate it going on quite so long. Since it has dragged out a bit, I thought it might be helpful to pull everything together in one place.
If you click play above, you will find a lithium-ion battery megapod: all the battery pieces read aloud, plus the podcast with Chloe Holzinger, strung together into one three-hour-long beast.
Links to all the pieces:
A primer on lithium-ion batteries: how they work and how they are changing
The many varieties of lithium-ion batteries battling for market share
Competitors to lithium-ion batteries in the grid storage market
Volts podcast: battery analyst Chloe Holzinger on possible futures for lithium-ion
As always, thank you for reading and listening. If you value this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Volts.
Forest says Happy Spring!
Battery Week: everything in one place
Excellent series! Thank you for compiling it. You have an excellent narration voice.
I just read this in response to dendrite formation in LIBs. Your thoughts? "Lithium dendrite formation is strongly dependent on the surface nature of lithium anodes," says study author Professor Yong Min Lee from South Korea's Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST). "A crucial strategy for LMBs (lithium-metal batteries), therefore, is to build an efficient solid-electrolyte interface (SEI) at the lithium surface."
Lee and his colleagues have approached this problem by using lithium metal powder as a starting point, which creates a higher surface area and enables the creation of thin and wide electrodes. One shortcoming of this technique, however, has been the uneven nature of the surface, which again leads the battery to failure.
The solution, the DGIST scientists have found, may lie in the addition of lithium nitrate. Pre-planting the compound during the fabrication process allowed the team to create ultra-thin lithium-metal anodes with a smooth and uniform interface layer on the surface. This proved to keep the battery stable over 450 charging cycles, in which it retained 87 percent of its capacity and exhibited a coulombic efficiency of 96 percent.
"We expect that pre-planting lithium stabilized additives into the LMP electrode would be a stepping-stone towards the commercialization of large-scale lithium-metal, lithium-sulfur, and lithium-air batteries with high specific energy and long cycle life," says Lee.
The research was published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials."