Graphene-Enhanced Li-ion Batteries That Charge In Minutes

[Guest PNNL]

New battery materials developed by the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Vorbeck Materials Corp. of Jessup, Md., could enable electric vehicles, power tools and even cell phones to recharge in minutes rather than hours.

 

In collaboration with Vorbeck and researcher Ilhan Aksay at Princeton University, PNNL has demonstrated that small quantities of graphene — an ultra-thin sheet of carbon atoms — can dramatically improve the power and cycling stability of lithium-ion batteries, while maintaining high energy storage capacity. The pioneering work could lead to the development of batteries that store larger amounts of energy and recharge quickly.

 

Today, a typical cell phone battery takes between two and five hours to fully recharge. Researchers think using new battery materials with graphene could cut recharge time to less than 10 minutes.

 

Battelle, which operates PNNL for DOE, entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Vorbeck for use of its unique graphene material, Vor-xTM, in battery materials synthesis research. Click here to read the announcement from Vorbeck.

 

This research is made possible the by the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Technology Commercialization Fund.

[Guest Vor-charge]

Today, batteries are built for power or for capacity, but cannot deliver both. Vor-x™ functionalized graphene based battery electrodes break this traditional trade-off, providing the best of both worlds: a long-lasting, high-powered battery.

 

Vorbeck’s battery electrode materials also enhance cycle life, leading to more charges before your battery needs to be replaced. More charges, more energy in each charge, less time per charge.

 

info@vorbeck.com

tel 301.497.9000

8306 Patuxent Range Road

Unit 105

Jessup MD 20794

[Guest Chu]

Lithium-ion batteries have become ubiquitous in today's consumer electronics -- powering our laptops, phones, and iPods. Research funded by DARPA is pushing the limits of this technology and trying to create some of the tiniest batteries on Earth, the largest of which would be no bigger than a grain of sand.

 

These tiny energy storage devices could one day be used to power the electronics and mechanical components of tiny micro- to nano-scale devices.

 

Jane Chang, an engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, is designing one component of these batteries: the electrolyte that allows charge to flow between electrodes.

 

"We're trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller," says Chang.

 

To reach this goal, Chang is thinking in three dimensions in collaboration with Bruce Dunn and other researchers at UCLA. She's coating well-ordered micro-pillars or nano-wires -- fabricated to maximize the surface-to-volume ratio, and thus the potential energy density -- with electrolyte, the conductive material that allows current to flow in a battery.

 

Using atomic layer deposition -- a slow but precise process that allows layers of material only an atom thick to be sprayed on a surface -- she has successfully applied the solid electrolyte lithium aluminosilicate to these nanomaterials.

 

The research is still in its early stages: other components of these 3D microbatteries, such as the electrodes, have also been developed, but they have yet to be assembled and integrated to make a functioning battery.