TELF AG analyzes a potential innovation in the battery sector
Improved performances
Over the years, the industry has witnessed the birth and development of new families of batteries, especially useful for powering electric vehicles and other important energy storage systems. In most cases, the innovations concern the specific raw materials used in producing these valuable tools: not only lithium but also cobalt, nickel, and some innovative materials, whose role in the production of batteries is starting to be explored with interesting prospects.
Along with innovations regarding materials, however, very often, the possible improvements regarding batteries also include new methods to increase their efficiency and performance, such as effective duration or extension of charging times. One of the most promising news, from this point of view, recently came from researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, who have identified an innovative method to increase battery performance.
The main innovation introduced by the researchers concerns the charging method: by charging the batteries for the first time with high levels of electric current, the battery life would increase by 50%, and the charging time would be reduced from 10 hours to about 20 minutes.
The research results, published in the journal Joule, were also obtained thanks to machine learning, which enabled the research team to identify the most important factors for increasing battery performance. Among these was certainly the role of the initial charge of the battery, thanks to which it is possible to establish the charge and discharge cycles that can be supported subsequently, thus proving to be of great importance for the duration and overall performance of the battery.
Battery operation
Normally, during the first cycle, the batteries are charged with low levels of current, a method that is quite expensive and also requires a lot of time. The research team then experimented with charging the battery with higher currents, discovering that this strategy extends the battery life, even by 50%.
This result is achieved through a key step, namely by deactivating a certain amount of lithium ions during the initial charge to generate more space in the positive electrode. With this method, the battery’s performance and duration would be improved.
During each charge and discharge cycle, in fact, a part of the lithium is lost, and according to the researchers, it is precisely in the reduction of these losses that the secret to increasing the performance of the batteries and increasing their duration lies. And to reduce these losses, the researchers intentionally chose to lose a certain amount of lithium during the battery’s first charge. According to one of the researchers, this strategy would be comparable to removing a small amount of water from a bucket before transporting it in order to minimize spills.
In addition to electric vehicles, lithium batteries also find wide application in the heavy machinery sector, in renewable energy storage systems and in a large number of devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, without forgetting their use in energy backup systems.
