Description:
- Sodium-ion batteries
- Flexible power sources
- Wearable electronics
Abstract
Researchers at USC have developed a method to deposit red phosphorus nanodots densely and uniformly onto reduced graphene oxide sheets to minimize the sodium ion diffusion length and the sodiation/desodiation stresses, and the reduced graphene oxide network also serves as electron pathway and creates free space to accommodate the volume variation of phosphorus particles. The resulting flexible anode achieves 1165.4, 510.6, and 135.3 mAh/g specific charge capacity at 159.4, 31878.9, and 47818.3 mA/g charge/discharge current density in rate capability test, and a 914 mAh/g capacity after 300 deep cycles in cycling stability test at 1593.9 mA/g current density, which marks a significant performance improvement for red phosphorus anodes.
Benefit
- Easy fabrication
- Robust and immune to volume expansion
- Cheaper and more versatile than state of the art systems
- Faster charging compared to other techniques
Market Application
In energy storage technology, lithium-ion batteries are the dominant power supply for portable devices and electrical vehicle due to their high energy density and stable cycling performance. The looming cost and environmental limits of this promising battery system has led to an exploration of several alternative strategies, such as sodium-ion battery. However, the anode part becomes the main drawback of sodium-ion batteries because the typical graphite anode employed in lithium-ion batteries does not intercalate with sodium ions thermodynamically; this problem is related to the larger size of the sodium ions, and thus makes it impossible to simply adopt the recent knowledge developed for high performance lithium-ion batteries directly onto sodium-ion chemistry.
Publications
Liu, Yihang, et al. "Red phosphorus nanodots on reduced graphene oxide as a flexible and ultra-fast anode for sodium-ion batteries." ACS nano 11.6 (2017): 5530-5537. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.7b00557
Stage of Development
- Experimentally validated
- Available for licensing