High-Performance, Low Weight Lithium-Air Battery to Power Future EVs

Lithium-air batteries are also expected to have a higher energy density so they would store more power than current lithium-ion tech.

A breakthrough in battery technology could lead to electric cars having five times more range than they do now, making it entirely possible to drive from London to Edinburgh on one charge.

However, as is the case with other next-generation batteries, there are several practical challenges that need to be addressed before lithium-air batteries become a viable alternative to gasoline.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge on Thursday announced the creation of a laboratory demonstration model of a lithium-oxygen battery that overcomes numerous barriers that have held back the development of this technology.

However, senior author Professor Clare Grey says that “what we’ve achieved is a significant advance for this technology and suggests whole new areas for research – we haven’t solved all the problems inherent to this chemistry, but our results do show routes forward towards a practical device”. The battery produced by Cambridge relies on a highly porous, “fluffy” carbon electrode constructed from graphene, made from sheets of carbon just one atom thick. It also uses an electrode made of graphene, a form of carbon.

A new battery developed by British scientists could pave the way to electric cars with the same energy storage capacity and endurance as petrol and diesel vehicles. Previous versions have been inefficient and unstable, tending to “die” after multiple charge and discharge cycles. Rechargeable batteries have been around for decades – the lithium-ion battery that powers many mobile devices is marking its 25th anniversary next year – but scaling up the technology to the level of powering automobiles has proven hard.

But the latest approach has shown increased energy efficiency of up to 93 percent, and does so by relying on a very different kind of chemistry than previous attempts, employing lithium hydroxide (LiOH) instead of lithium peroxide (Li2O2). The demonstrator currentlyu requires pure oxygen, rather than air, and the team has yet to find a way to prevent the electrode from growing lithium dendrites, which can cause short-circuits and even explode the battery.

“There’s still a lot of work to do”, said Liu.