Another surprising breakthrough in electric vehicle battery research: battery life can be stably used for ten years!

Electric vehicles are in the news a lot right now, largely because air quality has become a hot topic. Traditional fuel-powered vehicles are one of the main sources of pollution, so governments around the world are trying to promote electric vehicles.

As the energy source of electric vehicles, battery technology has always been one of the key factors affecting the popularity of electric vehicles, and lithium batteries are currently considered to be one of the most promising next-generation batteries. Let's first look at the types of lithium batteries currently used in the mainstream market:

Ternary lithium batteries have high energy density and short charging time. They can be charged and discharged in cycles of about 1,000 times, and have a theoretical lifespan of 4 years.

Lithium iron phosphate batteries have a longer service life, with a charge and discharge cycle of about 2,000 times and a theoretical life of about 5 years.

The growing demand for electric vehicles has brought about rapid development in battery technology. How to improve the life of lithium batteries has become a problem that automobile manufacturers and scientists from all over the world are concerned about and need to solve.

As global electric vehicle sales double, the prices of battery materials such as lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt have soared, and the supply chain of these raw materials has also been unsustainable due to the epidemic. In order to make batteries that not only perform better than the batteries of current electric vehicles, but also make materials that meet the low cost, scientists have turned their attention to sulfur, which is available everywhere and cheaper. Sulfur's natural abundance and chemical structure enable it to store more energy.

A team of researchers at Drexel University recently published a study in the journal Communications Chemistry that showed they had developed a way to stably introduce sulfur into lithium-ion batteries using a carbon nanofiber cathode—and the results were astounding!

Carbonate electrolytes are the energy-transfer liquids used in commercial lithium-ion batteries. The challenge in introducing sulfur into lithium batteries with carbonate electrolytes is that the intermediate sulfur products (called polysulfides) undergo irreversible chemical reactions with the carbonate electrolyte. Due to this undesirable reaction, previous attempts to use sulfur cathodes in batteries with carbonate electrolyte solutions have resulted in near-impossibility and complete battery failure after only one cycle.

To eliminate the formation of polysulfides to avoid adverse reactions, the team developed a carbon nanofiber cathode and tried to use vapor deposition technology to confine sulfur in the carbon nanofiber cathode substrate, thereby slowing down the shuttle effect in ether-based lithium-sulfur batteries by reducing the movement of intermediate polysulfides.

After more than a year of testing, the battery's performance showed no degradation over 4,000 charge-discharge cycles, the equivalent of 10 years of normal use. And, as predicted, the battery's capacity was more than three times that of lithium-ion batteries.

"When we started testing it, it started working beautifully -- something we didn't expect. We suspected that the sulfur cathode would cause the reaction to stop, but it actually performed very well and didn't cause shuttling," said Kalra, who led the study.

This research has greatly improved the service life of electric vehicle batteries. Instead of replacing batteries every three or four years, they can now be replaced every ten years, greatly reducing the cost of using electric vehicles! Batteries will become cheaper in the future.

Recently, many encouraging research results have been achieved in the research on batteries and charging of electric vehicles. If you are interested, you can read some related articles I have written before. I hope it will be helpful to everyone.