Battery Materials

Battery Materials List

In recent years, the application of nanomaterials in the field of batteries has made a great progress. Nanomaterials as battery materials can effectively improve the battery capacity and life. For lithium ion batteries, nanometer active materials have the characteristics of larger surface, smaller depth of lithium ion insertion and extraction, which makes the electrode has a small degree of charge and discharge polarization, high reversible capacity and long cycle life under large current. In addition, the high voidage of nanomaterials provides free space for the migration of organic solvent molecules, which makes the organic solvent have good compatibility and are suitable to be used as electrolyte. Therefore, nanometer new battery materials have attracted more and more attentions.

Applications:

As a new kind of battery material, nanomaterials can be applied in various batteries, including lithium ion batteries, fuel cells and the others.

• Lithium ion batteries field: Lithium ion battery is a kind of secondary battery that rely on the movement of lithium ions between the anode and cathode electrodes. Due to environmental non-pollution, lithium ion batteries have been a research hotspot in recent years and many new battery materials have been widely applied in this field. For example, carbon nanotubes can be used as anode materials in lithium ion batteries, which can improve the performances.

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of the lithium ion battery.

• Fuel cells field: Fuel cell is a chemical device that converts the chemical energy of fuel directly into electric energy. Fuel cells have the advantages of high-power generation efficiency, low environmental pollution, high specific energy, low noise and high reliability. In order to further improve the performances of fuel cells, many new battery materials, such as nano-catalysts, have been developed.
• The others: Battery materials are also widely used in other fields including lead-acid batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, nickel-hydrogen batteries and the others.

Classification:

There are many kinds of materials that make up batteries, which can be divided into the following categories.

• Electrolyte: As for electrolyte, solid electrolyte is a relatively new material. Solid-state lithium-ion batteries have become one of the research hotspots due to their excellent safety and plasticity. The development of solid electrolyte with high ionic conductivity is the key to the solid lithium ion batteries. For example, based on synergistic effects, composite materials are developed by adding ceramic fillers such as zeolite and silicon-rich kaolin to the polymer electrolyte to improve ion conductivity and electrode/electrolyte interface stability.
• Anode materials: Many new anode materials are developed including carbon nanotubes, nano-doped carbon materials, nanometer tin dioxide material and the others. For example, carbon nanotube is a new developed anode material for lithium ion batteries. The special microstructure of carbon nanotube makes the embedding depth of lithium ion small, which is beneficial to improve the charging and discharging capacity and current density of lithium ion battery. Therefore, carbon nanotube is an ideal electrode material for lithium-ion batteries.

Figure 2. An example of carbon nanotubes used as anode material for lithium ion battery.

• The others: In addition to the above, the battery materials also include new type cathode materials, diaphragm and the others.

References

1. Sahoo M, Ramaprabhu S. Solar synthesized tin oxide nanoparticles dispersed on graphene wrapped carbon nanotubes as a Li ion battery anode material with improved stability[J]. RSC Advances, 2017, 7(23):13789-13797.
2. Qi W Shapter J G, Wu Q, et al. Nanostructured anode materials for lithium-ion batteries: principle, recent progress and future perspectives[J].Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2017, 5(37).