Vanadium disulphide stabilised for faster charging batteries

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.