New electrode material combines high capacity and stability

A new design reportedly offers a new solution to this problem, with an international team of scientists developing a new electrode material that remains stable during charging, allowing the battery to withstand hundreds of cycles.

The team designed a new electrode for this type of battery, which it says offers unprecedented stability, the report said. The material consists of lithium titanate and lithium vanadium dioxide, ground into nanoscale particles. As a battery electrode, the material can provide high capacity and allow lithium ions to flow in both directions during charging and discharging. This leads to an electrode material that can maintain the battery’s charge-discharge capacity during operation without degradation, which the scientists attribute to a delicate balancing act in which the vanadium ions migrate from their original positions when the lithium ions “leave” to fill these vacancies.

Professor Naoaki Yabuuchi of Yokohama National University in Japan, who led the study, said that when the shrinkage and expansion are well balanced, stability is maintained when the battery is charged or discharged, that is, during cycling. We anticipate that by further optimizing the chemical composition of the electrolyte, a truly stable material—one that retains its volume during electrochemical cycling—can be developed. The new electrode material has been tested in solid-state batteries and performed impressively, with a high capacity of 300 mAh/g and, perhaps most importantly, no degradation at all over 400 charge-discharge cycles, the researchers say. The research results were recently published in the journal Nature Materials.