Novel Technique Brushes Powder onto Electrodes to Preserve Batteries

Aug, 2022 - By WMR

Researchers developed a novel technique for tuning the surface of anodes for batteries that involves only brushing powders into them, which may lead to next-gen energy storage devices

Scientists across the world are exploring lithium-metal among various other designs as an architecture holding significant potential. A team of researchers at Rice University introduced a novel technique for tuning anode surfaces for batteries. It involves only brushing powders into the batteries where the powder sticks to the anode becoming a slim, lithiated coating, which efficiently prevents the harmful dendrites from forming.

In a lithium-metal battery graphite anode is replaced with a pure lithium metal, which offers greater energy storage and could allow batteries to get charged faster and offers 10x more capacity; however these batteries don’t tend to work for longer period, as the dendrites start forming on the anode degrading the batteries quality. In the new study, the researchers developed a technique to overcome this issue in which they brush the anode for creating a surface with texture and brush a powder of created from sulfur and phosphorous onto the anode. This results into the powder reacting with the lithium metal anode and forming a protective, thin film, which then changes the surface energy.

Due to this film, the anode surface gets tuned and promotes uniform behavior throughout the cycling. This further increases the durability of the battery. The researchers tested this technique in 340 charging cycles of cells and found that it retained 70% more capacity compared to off-the-shelf batteries. Moreover, due to this film, batteries were able retain ultra-low polarization for more than 4,000 hours, which is nearly 8x longer times than anodes with no film. According to the researchers, with this method, the manufacturing of high-capacity batteries would become easy along with improving their efficiency.