New Lithium Metal Batteries ‘Build Themselves’
Lithium metal batteries are capable of doubling the capacity of today's standard lithium-ion cells. Researchers from the University of Michigan have found that lithium metal batteries can be built utilizing a lot of the current battery manufacturing system, removing a major challenge for automakers in producing electric vehicles. Lithium metal is reactive and weak, making it very difficult to handle and integrate into batteries, especially using state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment. The University of Michigan team found a workaround that essentially allows the battery to build itself. Their approach harnesses the lithium already contained within common cathode materials. When the battery is charged for the first time, the lithium ions on the cathode side of the cell are extracted and moved to the anode side of the cell, effectively synthesizing a lithium metal anode.
Transcript
00:00:01 the battery is a difficult technology to improve [Music] i feel like the number of opportunities to make a battery that can compete with lithium ion or is better than lithium ion really the numbers become limited researchers at the university of michigan
00:00:17 have been developing a lithium metal solid-state battery that offers the same performance of conventional lithium-ion batteries but is about half the size for an electric vehicle that means being able to drive twice as far on a single charge so with lithium metal we've been here before in the 1980s they started to make
00:00:34 batteries with lithium metal but they found that due to its reactivity with liquid electrolytes these tiny tree-like structures called dendrites would form and there was a short circuit instantaneous discharge and we had fires sakamoto and his team sought to tackle the dendrite problem by creating a new ceramic
00:00:53 lithium conducting separator material to use in the solid state battery that material has shown promising results and now the team is working to leverage existing lithium-ion battery manufacturing infrastructure to produce these lithium metal batteries cheaply and safely we've simplified the manufacturing process from three components
00:01:12 cathode anode which is graphite and liquid separator to just the cathode and now a solid state electrolyte instead of liquid electrolyte after the cell is assembled we take the lithium from the cathode and then we electrochemically plate it on a foil such as copper for example and that's how we form the metallic
00:01:30 lithium electrode by reducing battery assembly to two main components the process is simpler and potentially cheaper and the volume of the battery is reduced by about 50 without compromising performance and in terms of safety because the team is electrochemically plating the lithium metal after the battery has been built
00:01:50 in order to create the anode highly reactive pure lithium metal never needs to be transported or handled during manufacturing now that sakamoto and his team have demonstrated their production approach in the lab they are working to partner with manufacturers to further prove its effectiveness at scale i feel like this is a battery moment in
00:02:08 history this transition from fossil fuels to an electric future is hinged upon the success of the battery you