Swiss research and development of graphene-doped LR6 battery effectively improves battery energy storage and its service life

Recently, concerns about many of the materials present in typical lithium-ion batteries have been well documented, and battery suppliers, automakers and other players are working with research institutions around the world to develop energy storage solutions that rely on more abundant materials.

In the field of stationary energy storage, sodium-ion technology has limited commercial applications. Since sodium is much more abundant than lithium, and this battery chemistry has a much lower risk of fire, it has several advantages. But sodium also has a much lower energy density than lithium, which is currently limited, especially in the field of electric vehicles and consumer electronics, where the physical size of the battery is a determining factor.

EPFL scientists say their latest research may open up new ways to increase the capacity of sodium-ion batteries. "Lithium is becoming a key material because it is widely used in mobile phone and car batteries, and sodium could, in principle, be a cheaper and more abundant alternative," said Ferrenz Simon, a visiting scientist in Laszlo Forro's group at EPFL. "This led us to seek a new battery architecture: sodium-doped graphene."

One challenge in increasing the capacity of sodium-ion batteries is that sodium particles do not insert well into the graphite electrodes typically used in lithium-ion batteries. By replacing graphite with graphene (both graphene and graphene are forms of carbon, graphite is a crystalline structure while graphene is a single layer of atoms), they were able to successfully coat the material with sodium.

The team used a chemical process that relies on liquid ammonia as a catalyst to drive the reaction and was able to produce a material consisting of a few layers of graphene with a high sodium content. They published their method in Ultra-Long Spin Lifetimes in Graphene Doped with Light Alkali Atoms in ACS Nano.

The material also opens up potential new avenues in the field of spintronics, which is important for applications in transistors and data storage. Although this is a very early discovery, the scientists working with EPFL are confident of its commercial potential. "Our material can be synthesized on an industrial scale and still maintain its excellent properties," said Simon, the paper's first author.

However, the team acknowledges that there is still much work to be done to develop actual devices using this technique. “But with the demand for batteries rising almost exponentially, this research opens up very promising possibilities for innovation,” they concluded.

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