What is a cr2032 3v lithium battery? Introduction to cr2032 3v lithium battery technology

Researchers at Oxis Energy, a startup company based in Abingdon, UK, are using a combination of lithium and sulfur to make batteries. Compared with the lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric vehicles, the newly developed batteries can store nearly twice the energy per kilogram. However, they do not last very long and will fail after about 100 charge and discharge cycles. But the company believes that for uses such as drones, submarines, and power packs carried by soldiers, weight is more important than price or life. Oxis's small pilot plant aims to produce 10,000 to 20,000 batteries per year. These batteries will be packaged in thin bags the size of a mobile phone.

This is not a super factory, at least not yet. But Oxis Chief Technology Officer David Ainsworth said the company is eyeing a bigger "cake": the $100 billion electric vehicle market. "The next few years will be very critical." Ainsworth said that he and others see lithium-sulfur batteries as the "successor" to lithium-ion batteries and will become the dominant battery technology.

They are encouraged by a series of recent reports. Many of the performance and durability challenges facing the technology can be overcome, the report said. "You're seeing progress in a lot of areas," said Brett Helms, a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States. However, people such as Linda Nazar, a chemist at the University of Toronto and a pioneer in lithium-sulfur batteries, are cautious. She believes that creating lithium-sulfur batteries that have high capacity while being cheap, light, small and safe is "a really difficult task." Improving one factor usually comes at the expense of other factors. "You can't optimize all factors at the same time," said Nazar.

Lithium-ion batteries contain two electrodes - a cathode and an anode. The two are separated by a liquid dielectric that allows lithium ions to move back and forth during the charging cycle. At the anode, lithium atoms are sandwiched between layers of highly conductive carbon - graphite. When the battery discharges, the lithium atoms give up electrons and generate an electric current. The resulting positively charged lithium ions move into the electrolyte. After powering a wide range of devices from mobile phones to Tesla cars, the electrons eventually return to the cathode, which is usually made of a mixture of different metal oxides. There, positive lithium ions in the electrolyte snuggle up against metal atoms that have absorbed traveling electrons. Charging reverses this molecular pattern, as an applied voltage pushes the lithium ions away from their metal hosts and back toward the anode.

Metal oxide cathodes are reliable, but these metals, usually combinations of cobalt, nickel, and manganese, are expensive. They are also heavy, since two metal atoms need to join forces to hold a single electron. That limits battery performance to about 200 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg). Sulfur is much cheaper, and each sulfur atom can hold two electrons. In theory, a battery with a sulfur cathode could store 500 Wh/kg or more.

However, sulfur is not an ideal material for an electrode. For one thing, it is insulating: It cannot pass electrons to lithium ions passing through from the anode. In 2009, a game-changer occurred: a team led by Nazar found that sulfur could be embedded in a cathode made of the same conductive carbon as the anode. While this approach worked, it brought other problems. Carbon forms like graphite are highly porous. That increases the battery's overall size without increasing storage performance. That means more expensive liquid electrolytes are needed to fill the pores. Worse, when lithium ions combine with sulfur atoms at the cathode, they react to form soluble molecules called polysulfides. These molecules drift away, degrading the cathode and limiting the number of charging cycles. Polysulfides also migrate to the anode. There, they wreak further havoc.

Today, breakthroughs are being made on all fronts. Three groups have made progress in solving the cathode problem. Last year, for example, a team led by Helms reported in Nature Communications that they added a polymer layer to a carbon-sulfur cathode that encapsulated the polysulfides and allowed the battery to continue to be used after 100 charging cycles. Another team, led by ArumugamManthiram, a researcher at the University of Texas, replaced the graphite in the cathode with highly conductive flakes of graphite that are only a single atom thick. As they reported in the 12 January issue of ACS Energy Letters, the new graphite cathode holds five times more sulfur than conventional graphite cathodes, greatly improving energy storage. More recently, a team led by chemist Nanfeng Zheng of Xiamen University in China reported in the journal Joule that they created an ultrathin "separator" by placing thin sheets of polypropylene on nitrogen-doped carbon particles. Located on top of the cathode, it "captures" polysulfides and converts them into harmless lithium-sulfur particles. This increases the battery's energy output and helps them continue to be used after 500 charging cycles.

All of these advances will help push lithium-sulfur batteries further, said George Crabtree, director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne National Laboratory. "It's hard to say whether these are the final breakthroughs that will succeed, but I'm optimistic," Crabtree said.

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