New lithium battery anode material increases charging speed by 16 times

    A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a new silicon anode architecture that can be used in lithium batteries to make the charging process 16 times faster. The new design is built on a 3D structure of conical carbon nanotube materials. It can make the battery 40% lighter than before, but can carry 60% more power than before, which will make the charging speed about 16 times faster.

    As lithium batteries are widely used, people have also conducted a lot of research to improve their performance. The search for the "perfect" electrode material has never stopped. In the commercial field, the current anodes are mostly made of graphite carbon, which can carry 370mAh of electricity per gram (370mAh/g specific capacity). If the anode is made of carbon nanotubes, the performance can be tripled to 1000mAh/g specific capacity. Further research has found that silicon is a better battery anode material. Because it has a specific capacity of 4200mAh/g. Compared with the current commercial batteries, it provides more than 10 times the performance. However, directly using silicon anodes cannot work properly in the existing lithium battery structure. Because silicon and lithium react inside the battery, it will expand to 4 times its normal size.

    Now, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have developed a new architecture to apply silicon to the anode of lithium batteries. Not only can it carry more power per unit weight of material, but it can also charge about 16 times faster. The researchers first built a layer of graphene sheets, and then used columnar carbon nanotubes to build a columnar nanostructure on top of it. Finally, they used a mild inductively coupled plasma to turn the columnar nanotubes into a cone-shaped structure, and finally they deposited amorphous silicon on top.

    Lithium-ion batteries using this structure of anode also show extremely high stability in rapid charge and discharge cycles, with the anode reaching 1954mAh/g (five times the performance of traditional anodes). After 230 charge and discharge cycles, it still retains a specific capacity of 1200mAh/g. If this battery technology can be mass-produced, it is believed that the impact on the smartphone and electric vehicle industries will be huge.