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Manufacturing Nano-Powder-Based Ceramic for Fireproof Lithium-ion Batteries

Two billion lithium-ion battery cells are produced every year. Due to their long life and high energy density, they are the preferred battery in mobile devices and laptops, and are gaining popularity in electric vehicles and the aerospace industry. However, these batteries can get hot and the most prevalent lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable liquid solution. When they fail, they can cause fires. To combat this danger, University of Michigan engineers have developed a new way to produce a nano-powder-based ceramic membrane that can replace flammable liquids in lithium-ion batteries. Because these super thin ceramics control the properties of ion transport, they have the potential to be valuable in other arenas including the growing industry of wearable medical sensors.

Topics:
Automotive Batteries Coatings & Adhesives Electronic Components Electronics & Computers Manufacturing & Prototyping Materials Power Sensors

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 lithium ion batteries are actually probably 30 years old and U the first companies uh to work with them used as they still do today lithium metal because it's very uh lightweight but it has a very high energy density per unit volume we're talking about making a ceramic membrane that will conduct lithium ions at rates that allow us to replace liquids used in lithium iion

    00:00:28 batteries to allow the battery to operate when they fail they expose lithium to Air and the lithium Burns we've all seen pictures of fires from lithium batteries some are rather extraordinary in their violence so the liquid is to contain the lithium ions that go between the lithium metal which is the anode and the cathode that captures the lithium ions in the

    00:00:52 generation of electricity and then when you're charging it the reverse occurs okay but it goes through a liquid medium in traditional batteries in our case we have a ceramic that operates at the same or even better rates than the liquids that are currently used by using our nanop powders we can make we can basically eliminate the liquids which are organic and burn very nicely as well

    00:01:17 we can raise the operating temperature of the battery so we can make blocks of ceramic we can make thin films and part of the reason is that when you make very fine powders you are able to cause them to densify at much lower temperatures and with a higher degree of reproducibility than you can in using any other method we are able to access Nano powders with compositions that

    00:01:41 other people can't make easily we might describe this as a jet engine that's on its side and basically we are putting a mixture of alcohol as fuel and oxygen through uh an aerosolizing system and we are igniting that and we're combusting the Mist now the alcohol contains dissolved metal salts and those metal salts are combusted and then the

    00:02:12 system is quenched about down here and it's quenched so fast that all of the ions that are produced in the flame condense as one and they make soot and the soot basically is a nanop particles there are other solutions that do work there's polymers that eliminate a lot of the liquids but the polymers usually work with liquids so a ceramic is much more resistant it's completely solid

    00:02:38 Ceramics don't expand hardly at all once you can do that and you can control the properties of ion transport then you can make oxygen sensors you can so you can Envision these could be used at some point if they're thin enough for lab on a chip type applications or sensor applications in every room where you can have Co monitors and so forth if you make these

    00:03:02 thin enough you can Envision making them wearable so that's what we enable we enable safer materials it's it's really kind of exciting he learns by listening to someone you know do the practice exams and you know don't work really hard with this class it's completely different I'm working hard uh I mean I'm reading all the time nobody learns by listening to someone