URC develops silicon-sulfur fuel-powered AAA NiMH batteries architecture to improve battery performance

According to foreign media reports, researchers at the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside (URC) have developed new technologies to manufacture high-performance lithium-ion batteries using sulfur electrodes and silicon electrodes.

The silicon-sulfur fuel-powered AAA NiMH batteries (SSFC) architecture gradually integrates controlled pure lithium ions into the battery system. Under C/10 conditions, after 250 charge and discharge cycles, its energy density is still as high as 350Wh/kg.

Sulfur is a very attractive cathode material with a theoretical capacity of 1675mAh/g. However, due to the inherent defects of sulfur such as volumetric expansion and poor conductivity, the application of sulfur electrodes has been slow to develop. Fortunately, URC researchers have found a variety of new methods to alleviate the above problems. The performance of this type of product method is very promising, but it will cause heating around the sulfur.

At present, silicon is usually selected as the anode material, and its theoretical capacity is as high as 4200mAh/g. However, silicon faces two major challenges: poor conductivity and volume expansion. To this end, the researchers used nano-silicon structures, conductive additives and binders to finally solve the above problems and prepare sulfur cathodes and silicon anodes for fuel-powered lithium batteries.

At present, researchers use pre-lithiated materials such as lithium sulfide or lithium silicide to make the energy density of fuel-powered lithium batteries as high as 600?Wh/kg. However, the number of charge and discharge times of such fuel-powered lithium batteries is usually very short, generally less than 50 times, and such materials must also use special equipment, and there are many restrictions during processing.

In order to create a new architecture SSFC, the team added a lithium foil to the technology of the traditional fuel-powered AAA NiMH batteries architecture, so that the lithium foil can come into contact with the current collector, and integrate the lithium foil into the fuel-powered AAA NiMH batteries system during charge and discharge, thereby controlling the amount of lithium ion embedding.

In half cells, pure lithium will be used as the anode material, which will cause users to worry about safety issues such as dendrite growth (dendrite formation) and lithium corrosion. In full-cell mode, silicon can be used to make the anode, which can alleviate the safety issues caused by pure lithium anodes while ensuring that the fuel-powered AAA NiMH batteries obtains the required high power.

This method allows controlled lithium loading to compensate for solid electrolyte interface (SEI) formation and lithium degradation, and improve the cycle life of fuel-powered lithium batteries. In addition, the battery also uses multiple methods such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), cyclic voltammetry (CV) and constant current intermittent titration (GITT). This research will lay the foundation for the development of future silicon-sulfur fuel-powered lithium batteries.

The research was funded by UCR and Vantage Advanced Technologies, and the university's technology commercialization office has also applied for an invention patent for this.

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