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The new battery is also inherently protected from overcharging, the team says, because the chemical reaction in this case is naturally self-limiting — when overcharged, the reaction shifts to a different form that prevents further activity. “With a typical battery, if you overcharge it, it can cause irreversible structural damage or even explode,” Li says. But with the nanolithia battery, “we have overcharged the battery for 15 days, to a hundred times its capacity, but there was no damage at all.”
In cycling tests, a lab version of the new battery was put through 120 charging-discharging cycles, and showed less than a 2 percent loss of capacity, indicating that such batteries could have a long useful lifetime. And because such batteries could be installed and operated just like conventional solid lithium-ion batteries, without any of the auxiliary components needed for a lithium-air battery, they could be easily adapted to existing installations or conventional battery pack designs for cars, electronics, or even grid-scale power storage.
Because these “solid oxygen” cathodes are much lighter than conventional lithium-ion battery cathodes, the new design could store as much as double the amount of energy for a given cathode weight, the team says. And with further refinement of the design, Li says, the new batteries could ultimately double that capacity again.
All of this is accomplished without adding any expensive components or materials, according to Li. The carbonate they use as the liquid electrolyte in this battery “is the cheapest kind” of electrolyte, he says. And the cobalt oxide component weighs less than 50 percent of the nanolithia component. Overall, the new battery system is “very scalable, cheap, and much safer” than lithium-air batteries, Li says.
The team expects to move from this lab-scale proof of concept to a practical prototype within about a year.
“This is a foundational breakthrough, which may shift the paradigm of oxygen-based batteries,” says Xiulei Ji, an assistant professor of chemistry at Oregon State University, who was not involved in this work. “In this system, commercial carbonate-based electrolyte works very well with solvated superoxide shuttles, which is quite impressive and may have to do with the lack of any gaseous O2 in this sealed system. All active masses of the cathode throughout cycling are solid, which presents not only large energy density but compatibility with the current battery manufacturing infrastructure.”
The research team included MIT research scientists Akihiro Kushima and Zongyou Yin; Lu Qi of Peking University; and Khalil Amine and Jun Lu of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
