After 10 years of research, lithium-sulfur battery technology has finally matured, and the range of electric vehicles has been tripled.

According to the latest news reports, lithium-sulfur batteries are about to be commercialized, which is a great shock to both the industry and academia!

The theoretical energy density of lithium-sulfur batteries is as high as 2600Wh/kg, which is 18 times the energy density of current lithium iron phosphate batteries! The successful commercialization of lithium-sulfur batteries is a revolutionary breakthrough for the electric vehicle industry.

The first to release this news was Theion, a German battery research institute, which has more than 30 world-renowned battery scientists. This is one of the reasons why their news attracted so much coverage from foreign media.

Lithium-sulfur batteries have attracted a lot of attention recently, and the academic community has published several major articles reporting on the breakthrough progress of its technology. However, it is incredible that they will be commercialized so soon.

Although lithium-sulfur batteries have ultra-high energy density, they have some fatal shortcomings that have prevented them from being commercialized. There are several major problems:

The polysulfide produced at the cathode during the charge and discharge process will dissolve in the electrolyte, causing a sharp drop in battery capacity and a very short cycle life, and even the battery will fail after one cycle. This is also a fatal shortcoming that restricts its commercial use.

Sulfur has poor electronic and ionic conductivity, which is not conducive to the high-rate performance of batteries.

During the charging and discharging process, the volume of sulfur changes greatly, which may cause damage to the battery.

Therefore, scientists have tried many ways to solve these problems. For example, in the past decade, most lithium-sulfur batteries have used ethers instead of carbonates as electrolytes because ethers do not react with polysulfides. As a result, lithium-sulfur batteries have shown excellent performance.

However, ether electrolytes are highly volatile, so the battery is prone to failure when the battery temperature is higher than room temperature.

In addition, on the cathode material, sulfur is compounded with carbon material, and the hardness of the carbon material is used to solve the problem of volume expansion while improving the conductivity of sulfur.

Although the academic community has made some breakthroughs in the above solutions recently, they are still some distance away from commercial use.

So, what did Theion Research Institute do in lithium-sulfur battery technology so that the new battery they developed could be commercialized so quickly?

Its CEO Dr. Ulrich Ehmes said: "Existing battery technology uses nickel, manganese and cobalt as the cathode. It is called NMC811 because it contains 80% nickel, 10% cobalt and 10% manganese. In our proposal, we replace this NMC811 with sulfur. So we have no nickel, no manganese, no cobalt, and we replace the current collective folding of copper and aluminum with graphene, so there is no aluminum and copper in our battery. Our battery only has lithium metal foil, sulfur and carbon. In order for this technology to work, the sulfur must be melted to form crystals."

Their technology combines the crystalline material properties of sulfur with carbon nanotubes and patented solid electrolytes. The combination of sulfur crystals and carbon nanotubes solves the problems of sulfur's conductivity and volume expansion, and the solid electrolyte is used to prevent the occurrence of adverse chemical reactions.

After ten years of hard work, the new lithium-sulfur battery they developed has extended the battery cycle life while ensuring high energy density.

At present, their first-generation technology has achieved an energy density of 500Wh/kg and 800Wh/L for lithium-sulfur batteries. Their goal is to increase the energy density of lithium-sulfur batteries to 700Wh/kg and 1000Wh/L with the second-generation technology in 2023; and to increase the energy density of lithium-sulfur batteries to 1kWh/kg and 1200Wh/L with the third-generation technology in 2024!

They claim that the first generation of batteries alone will triple the range of electric vehicles! To the tune of 900 miles (1440 km) on a single charge! However, they are not planning to offer their technology to the electric vehicle industry, but to the aerospace industry.

They plan to make their technology available to the electric vehicle industry by 2024, by which time electric vehicles will have a significantly improved range. In addition, the battery will weigh only 225 kilograms, which is lighter than most current electric vehicle batteries.

Of course, batteries with such a high energy density also have certain disadvantages, which is that the charging time will be relatively long. It takes about 30 hours to fully charge the battery using an ordinary household charger, and it may take more than an hour to charge the battery to 80% using the fastest DC fast charging charger.

In addition, the cycle life of these new batteries is not very long, currently only 1,000 cycles, which may also be a feature of lithium-sulfur batteries.

However, it can have super long battery life on a single charge, and 1,000 cycle lifespans are enough.

Given the relatively low price of lithium-sulfur batteries, if they can deliver the new lithium-sulfur batteries as targeted, the price of electric vehicles will drop significantly and range anxiety will be eliminated.