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The conductive coating, HOS-PFM, was developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
HOS-PFM conducts both electrons and ions at the same time, the research team said. This ensures battery stability and high charge-discharge rates, while enhancing battery life.
“The advance opens up a new approach to developing EV batteries that are more affordable and easy to manufacture,” said Gao Liu, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area.
The coating also shows promise as a battery adhesive that could extend the lifetime of a lithium-ion battery from an average of 10 years to about 15 years, Liu added.
To demonstrate HOS-PFM’s conductive and adhesive properties, Liu and his team coated aluminium and silicon electrodes with the material and tested their performance in a lithium-ion battery setup.
Silicon and aluminium are promising electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries because of their potentially high energy storage capacity and light weight. The cheap and abundant materials quickly wear down after multiple charge-discharge cycles, however.
During experiments at the Advanced Light Source and the Molecular Foundry, the researchers demonstrated that the HOS-PFM coating significantly prevents silicon- and aluminium-based electrodes from degrading during battery cycling, while delivering high battery capacity over 300 cycles, a performance rate on par with today’s state-of-the-art electrodes.
The results are impressive, Liu said, because silicon-based lithium-ion cells typically last for a limited number of charge-discharge cycles.
The HOS-PFM coating could allow the use of electrodes containing as much as 80% silicon, the researchers said. Such high silicon content could increase the energy density of lithium-ion batteries by at least 30%, Liu said.
Because silicon is cheaper than graphite, the standard material for electrodes today, cheaper batteries could significantly increase the availability of entry-level EVs, he added.
The research was supported by the US Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. The team plans to work with companies to scale up HOS-PFM for mass manufacturing, and the technology is available for licensing.
The work was published in Nature Energy.
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