Asphalt anodes help create better lithium metal batteries

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour developed anodes comprising porous carbon made from asphalt that reportedly showed favourable stability after more than 500 charge-discharge cycles.

A high-current density of 20 milliamps per square centimetre demonstrated the material’s promise for use in rapid charge and discharge devices that require high-power density. The finding is reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

“The capacity of these batteries is enormous, but what is equally remarkable is that we can bring them from zero charge to full charge in five minutes, rather than the typical two hours or more needed with other batteries,” Tour said in a statement.

The Tour lab previously used a derivative of asphalt — untreated gilsonite, the same type used for the battery — to capture greenhouse gases from natural gas. For this project, the researchers mixed asphalt with conductive graphene nanoribbons and coated the composite with lithium metal through electrochemical deposition.