Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, February 14, according to the Nikkei News, Japan's National Institute of Materials (NIMS), Softbank Corp. and OHARA (Ohara) jointly developed a technology that can restrain the deterioration of lithium-air batteries. As a result, the practicability of the "lithium-air battery", which is called the ultimate battery, has been greatly improved.

According to reports, the researchers doubled the battery life by inserting thin sheets made of solid electrolytes between the positive and negative electrodes to protect the lithium used in the negative electrodes. The team will further promote the extension of life and strive to be used as a power supply for drones and so on.

With the support of the Japanese Science and Technology Revitalization Agency (JST), NIMS has been committed to the basic research of lithium-air batteries with high energy density. They jointly established the NIMS-SoftBank Advanced Technology Development Center with Softbank Corp. in 2018. Since then, they have been working on the practical application of lithium-air batteries, and then developed lithium-air batteries with an energy density of 500Wh/kg per unit weight in 2021. However, the cycle life of this development is less than 10 times, so it is not worth putting into production at all.

Initially, the researchers added a protective film to the lithium-air battery, but the solid electrolyte, which is 90 μ m thick, is a very heavy material, thus reducing its energy density.

Therefore, they subsequently developed a solid electrolyte with a thickness of 6 μ m and applied it to lithium-air batteries as a protective film for negative electrodes. The prototype lithium-air battery can guarantee a stable charge-discharge reaction of more than 20 cycles on the basis of more than 400Wh/kg (more than twice that of the traditional lithium-ion battery).

CTOnews.com cautioned that while this represents a big step forward in the use of lithium-air batteries, it is not enough to put on the market compared to ternary lithium batteries with a theoretical life of 800 cycles and lithium iron phosphate batteries with more than 2000 cycles, even if it does have a much higher energy density.

△ 6 μ m thick solid electrolyte film source: NIMS

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