5X Lithium Sulfur Battery with a Gut Feeling

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Aircraft Materials, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Bio-mimicry presents itself in aerodynamics, from the emulation of soaring bird’s wing shapes on sailplane’s surfaces to owl-feather-like trailing edges on wind turbines.  We don’t often think of biological equivalents in energy storage (your editor didn’t until now, at least).  But researchers at Cambridge University in England and the Beijing Institute of Technology in China have turned to the small intestine for their breakthrough in battery development. Tiny cells lining the human intestine inspired these researchers to develop a prototype of a lithium-sulfur battery that they claim could have five times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion batteries.  Dr. Paul Coxon from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy says “This gets us a long way through the bottleneck which is preventing the development of better batteries.” Is That You, Villi? Villi in the gut help process food being digested, trapping nutrient particles in millions of tiny, “finger-like protrusions” which increase the absorbent surface area over which digestion takes place.  …

Lithium-Sulfur Cells Wrapped in Graphene

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Graphene is science fiction made real – a one-atom thick layer of hexagonal arrays of carbon which weigh next to nothing and are stronger than any other material on earth.  Wrap a layer of this stuff around “a novel multifunctional sulfur electrode that combines an energy storage unit and electron/ion transfer networks,” and you get “an extremely promising electrode structure design for rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries.” Lithium-sulfur batteries have the promise of reaching a theoretical specific energy density “approaching 2,600 Watt-hours per kilogram (Wh kg-1),” compared to currently available specific energy densities for lithium-ion cells of 130-220 Wh kg-1. Researchers led by Dr. Vasant Kumar at the University of Cambridge and Professor Renjie Chen at the Beijing Institute of Technology worked to overcome the shortcomings of lithium-sulfur batteries now under development – a “fading” of the sulfur through a series of reactions with the anode, electrolyte, and lithium cathode, a kind of “shuttling” between these battery components, and the small number …