Dr. Cui’s Pomegranate-inspired Battery Bears Fruit

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Dr. Yi Cui seems to get inspiration from food.  A few years ago, his research team came up with a “yolk-shell structure” that helped contain the high amount of lithium that silicon anodes were able to absorb.  That battery design promised much, and an embellishment of that design seems to hold even greater promise. His newest effort, working at Stanford University with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, features an electrode “designed like a pomegranate – with silicon nanoparticles clustered like seed in a tough carbon rind.”  This approach, according to its inventors, overcomes several remaining obstacles to the use of silicon in a new generation of lithium-ion batteries. Yi said the battery’s efficiency and longevity are promising.   “Experiments showed our pomegranate-inspired anode operates at 97 percent capacity even after 1,000 cycles of charging and discharging, which puts it well within the desired range for commercial operation.” Cui’s team has been working on preventing anode breakup for the …

That’s No Yolk!

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, GFC, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Dr. Cui is at it again!  In a seemingly endless stream of announcements, his work with silicon anodes keeps promising improvements in battery capacity and longevity.  The Stanford professor and his team, Stanford’s National Accelerator Laboratory (Formerly the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory all published papers on their latest joint accomplishment. Conceptual drawing of silicon filling carbon shell, TEM photo of actual expansion, and life cycle analysis for yolk-shell batteries Expansion and contraction of anodes and cathodes during charging and discharging of batteries causes flexing and eventual breakdown of a battery’s internal components.  Cui and other researchers have tried various strategies to mitigate or eliminate this flexing, but the latest tactic seems to promise longer battery life and greater power and energy. Calling it a “yolk-shell structure,” researchers seal commercially available single silicon nanoparticles in “conformal, thin, self-supporting carbon shells, with rationally-designed void space between the particles and the …