Researchers develop a battery cathode material that does it all

Battery electrode materials should do a lot. They must be drivers to obtain loads to and from the ions that swallow the electrodes. They also need to have an open structure that allows ions to move before reaching a site where they can be stored. The storage of many ions also causes the expansion of materials, creating mechanical constraints which can cause decomposition of the structure of the electrode material.

Because it is difficult to obtain all these properties from a single material, many electrodes are composite materials, with a chemical product used to allow ions enter and get out of the electrode, another to store them, and perhaps a third party which provides high conductivity. Unfortunately, this can create new problems, with breakdowns with interfaces between materials slowly degrading the battery capacity.

Now, a team of researchers offers equipment that apparently everything. It is reasonably driver, it allows lithium ions to move and find storage sites, and it is made of cheap and common elements. Perhaps the best of all, he undergoes a self-healing, smoothing the damage between the load / discharge cycles.

Large capacity

The research team, mainly based in China, has decided to limit the complexity of cathodes. “The conceptions of conventional composite cathodes, which generally incorporate an active cathode material, a catholyte and an electronic driver additive, are often limited by the fraction of substantial volume of electrochemically inactive components”, wrote the researchers. The solution, she said, was to create an all-in-one material that gets rid of most of these materials.

A certain number of items had brought in good luck with chlorine chemicals, which allowed the ions to move easily through the material but did not very well drive electricity. The researchers therefore experienced the preload of one of these materials with lithium. And they focused on iron chloride because it is a very cheap material.