The breakthrough from a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) could improve battery performance for consumer electronics, solar grid storage, and electric vehicles. The research is published in Nature Communications.
A lithium-ion battery charges and discharges as lithium ions move between the device’s anode and cathode. In a traditional lithium-ion battery, the anode is made of graphite and the cathode from lithium cobalt oxide. These materials perform well together, but researchers at Rensselaer believe the function can be enhanced.
"The way to make batteries better is to improve the materials used for the electrodes," said Nikhil Koratkar, professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at RPI, and corresponding author of the paper. "What we are trying to do is make lithium-ion technology even better in performance."
In this most recent work, Koratkar and his team are said to have improved performance by substituting cobalt oxide with vanadium disulphide (VS2).
"It gives you higher energy density, because it's light. And it gives you faster charging capability, because it's highly conductive. From those points of view, we were attracted to this material," said Koratkar.
Until now researchers have been challenged by VS2’s instability, a characteristic that would lead to short battery life. The Rensselaer researchers established why that instability was happening and developed a way to combat it.
The team, including Vincent Meunier, head of the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, and others, determined that lithium insertion caused an asymmetry in the spacing between vanadium atoms, known as Peierls distortion, which was responsible for the breakup of the VS2 flakes.
They discovered that covering the flakes with a nanolayered coating of titanium disulphide (TiS2) - a material that does not Peierls distort- would stabilise the vanadium disulphide flakes and improve their performance within the battery.
"This was new. People hadn't realised this was the underlying cause," Koratkar said in a statement. "The TiS2 coating acts as a buffer layer. It holds the VS2 material together, providing mechanical support."
Once that problem was solved, the team found that the VS2-TiS2 electrodes could operate at a high specific capacity, or store a lot of charge per unit mass. Koratkar said that vanadium and sulphur’s small size and weight allow them to deliver a high capacity and energy density. Their small size would also contribute to a compact battery.
When charging was done more quickly, Koratkar said, the capacity didn't dip as significantly as it often does with other electrodes. The electrodes were able to maintain a reasonable capacity because, unlike cobalt oxide, the VS2-TiS2 material is electrically conductive.
Koratkar sees multiple applications for this discovery in improving car batteries, power for portable electronics, and solar energy storage where high capacity is important, but increased charging speed would also be attractive.
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Whoopee, they've solved how to keep a light on but not a lot else.