The Power Lithium Battery Engineering Laboratory of Ningbo Institute of Materials has conducted research on aluminum ion batteries using graphene as the electrode. Recently, the research work was published online in "Advanced Energy Materials" with the title of Large sized new layer graphene enables and ultra fast long life aluminum ion batteries
Electrochemical energy storage technology is the key to solving the problem of grid connected power generation between electric vehicles and renewable energy. Lithium ion batteries using organic solvents as electrolytes have advantages in energy density, but there are safety hazards and limited lithium resources. In contrast, water-based non lithium-ion batteries (such as sodium ions, potassium ions, zinc ions, magnesium ions, etc.) have advantages such as high safety and low cost, and have important application prospects in the field of energy storage. Since 2013, the Power Lithium Battery Engineering Laboratory of Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has prospectively arranged the research on new concept batteries of non lithium ion batteries, and has made a series of progress in the basic research on new concept batteries of water system ions (ScientificReports2013,31946; ChemSusChem2014,72295; AdvancedEnergyMaterials2015,51400930; ScientificReports2015,518263; NatureCommunications 2016,711982). However, the cycle life of water-based ion batteries is relatively limited, generally less than 1000 cycles, making it difficult to meet the needs of large-scale energy storage. In 2015, Professor Dai Hongjie from Stanford University in the United States reported on a new type of aluminum ion battery in Nature (2015520324), which attracted widespread attention from academia and industry due to its durability, low flammability, and cost.
Inspired by this work, the Power Lithium Battery Engineering Laboratory of Ningbo Institute of Materials conducted research on aluminum ion batteries using graphene as the electrode. Recently, the research work was published online in "Advanced Energy Materials" (DOI: 10.1002/aenm. 201700034) with the title of Large sized new layer graphene enables and ultra fast long life aluminum ion batteries. In this work, researchers used mass-produced multi-layer graphene (produced and provided by Ningbo Moxi Technology Co., Ltd.) as the flexible positive electrode, metal aluminum as the negative electrode, and ionic liquid as the electrolyte to construct a 2V aluminum ion battery with ultra-long cycle life and ultra-high rate performance. Research has found that the thickness (number of layers) and transverse size of two-dimensional flake graphite like negative electrode materials have significant effects on the embedding behavior of AlCl4- ions. Compared to flake graphite with thousands of layers, multi-layer graphene has very few layers (below 10 layers), which can significantly reduce the activation energy of AlCl4 ion insertion and diffusion, making the battery have ultra-high rate performance, thus completing charging and discharging within 1 minute. On the other hand, electrodes made of larger sized multi-layer graphene have better flexibility and graphitization degree, and have stronger resistance to repeated insertion and removal of AlCl4- ions, resulting in an ultra long cycle life of the battery. After 10000 charging and discharging cycles, the capacity almost does not decay. In addition, this research work further revealed the intercalation chemical mechanism of AlCl4- ions in two-dimensional graphite like cathode materials such as multi-layer graphene and graphite through a series of fine characterization, namely the fourth and fifth order structural changes induced by intercalation ions. This research work not only has important guiding significance for the selection of graphite type positive electrode materials in aluminum ion batteries, but also has significant academic value for the development of practical fossil graphene based new long-life energy storage batteries.
The above research work has been supported by key deployment projects of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Youth Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation.
