Clean Technica lead first with a news item on February 7, 2023, that lithium could be on par with gasoline soon. Well at least in terms of energy density, which could eventually deliver fossil a death blow. We were half-expecting solid state lithium battery progress like that, what with all the work going on. But none the less it is great to be able to revel in success.
Progress from Solid State Lithium Battery Research
The work we report on here, is a joint effort involving Argonne National Laboratory, and researchers elsewhere in U.S. and Korea. An interim report confirms they achieved energy density of 685-watt-hour-per-kilogram at room temperature. And moreover this progress was achieved “inexpensively” because the prototype is a solid state lithium battery.
The abstract from their report cited by Clean Technica describes their invention as a Li20 lithium superoxide air battery formation. This apparently involves a four-electron formation more complex than the traditional lithium superoxide LiO2, and lithium peroxide Li2O2 conventions.
The main advantage of this arrangement, Argonne battery scientists Larry Curtiss and Khalil Amine explain, is that – in theory at least – this allows the creation of a “closed lithium air battery system”. This bypasses the need to import additional air oxygen from the environment – a safer and more efficient system.
More Information Revealed in Journal Nature
The team at Argonne and their associates believe “it might be possible to form LiO2 alone for use in a battery. However, solid LiO2 has been difficult to synthesize in pure form because it is thermodynamically unstable with respect to disproportionation.
However, they have apparently now succeeded in stabilizing it. This could lead to developing “a new closed battery system” in a solid state lithium battery, they hope. All of which has the potential of “offering truly five times the energy density of lithium ion,” they say.
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