In an entirely new approach to making lithium-ion batteries lighter, safer and more efficient, scientists at Stanford University and the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have reengineered one of the heaviest battery components – sheets of copper or aluminum foil known as current collectors – so they weigh 80% less and immediately quench any fires that flare up.
If adopted, the researchers said, this technology could address two major goals of battery research: extending the driving range of electric vehicles and reducing the danger that laptops, cell phones and other devices will burst into flames. This is especially important when batteries are charged super-fast, creating more of the types of battery damage that can lead to fires. The research team reports its work in a paper in Nature Energy.
The current collector has always been considered dead weight, and until now it hasn’t been successfully exploited to increase battery performance.in scientific studies, making the collector 80% lighter increased the energy density of lithium-ion batteries – how much energy they can store in a given weight – by 16–26%. That’s a big jump compared to the average 3% increase achieved in recent years.
Whether they come in the form of cylinders or pouches, lithium-ion batteries have two current collectors, one for each electrode. They distribute current flowing in or out of the electrode, and account for from 15% to as much as 50% of the weight of some high-power or ultrathin batteries. Shaving a battery’s weight is desirable in itself, producing lighter devices and reducing the amount of weight electric vehicles have to lug around; storing more energy per given weight allows both devices and EVs to go longer between charges.
Reducing battery weight and flammability could also have a big impact on recycling by making the transportation of recycled batteries less expensive.
To deal with the safety issue, “People have also tried adding fire retardant to the battery electrolyte, which is the flammable part, but you can only add so much before it becomes viscous and no longer conducts ions well
After brainstorming the problem, Cui, Ye and graduate student Yayuan Liu designed experiments for making and testing current collectors based on a lightweight polymer called polyimide, which resists fire and stands up to the high temperatures created by fast battery charging. A fire retardant – triphenyl phosphate (TPP) – was embedded in the polymer, which was then coated on both surfaces with an ultrathin layer of copper. The copper would not only do its usual job of distributing current, but also protect the polymer and its fire retardant.
Those changes reduced the weight of the current collector by 80% compared to today’s versions,which translates to an energy density increase of 16–26% in various types of battery. It also conducts current just as well as regular collectors, with no degradation.
When exposed to an open flame from a lighter, pouch batteries made with today’s commercial current collectors caught fire and burned vigorously until all the electrolyte burned away. But in batteries with the new flame-retardant collectors, the fire never really got going, producing very weak flames that went out within a few seconds, and did not flare up again even when the scientists tried to relight it.
One of the big advantages of this approach, is that the new collector should be easy to manufacture and also cheaper, because it replaces some of the copper with an inexpensive polymer. So scaling it up for commercial production, should be very doable.
This article is retrieved from https://www.materialstoday.com/energy/news/new-current-collector-batteries/