Trapped electrons to blame for lack of battery efficiency

An international team led by Texas A&M University chemist Sarbajit Banerjee is one step closer to build a better battery, thanks to new research that has the potential to create more efficient batteries by shedding light on the cause of one of their biggest problems -- a "traffic jam" of ions that slows down their charging and discharging process.
All batteries have three main components: two electrodes and an intervening electrolyte. Lithium ion batteries work under the so-called rocking-chair model. Imagine discharging and charging a battery as similar to the back-and-forth motion of a rocking chair. As the chair rocks one way, using its stored energy, lithium ions flow out of one electrode through the electrolyte and into the other electrode. Then as the chair rocks the other way, charging the battery after a day's use, the reverse happens, emptying the second electrode of lithium ions.
Using one of the world's most powerful soft X-ray microscopes -- the Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscope (STXM) -- at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) in tandem with decades of combined experience in materials science, Banerjee and collaborators from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Binghamton University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were able to image a traffic jam of lithium ions chemically driven through the nanowire-based channels of a simulated battery.

http://www.science.tamu.edu/news/story.php?story_ID=1614

 

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Very interesting. As child I made many experiements with electrolysis, including to build my own lead-sulfuric acids batteries. Much of that looked like miracles to me, and while some experiments worked nicely, other kept failing, and it was beyond my understanding why. (Some of those still make me wonder why they didn't work ...)

It's cool to see how scientists now can look into the materials, find out how ions and electrons move. I'm positive that with this sort of insight we'll be able to develop better matierals or material combinations for storing chemical and indirectly, electric, energy.

 

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