Imagine the comfort of having to recharge your phone only once every five days, or being able to drive your EV for hundreds of miles before having to stop and reconnect it to the grid. Well, soon that image might become reality as scientists have managed to create the world’s most efficient lithium-sulfur battery, capable of providing power to a smartphone for five continuous days.
Developed by researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, the new battery has a capacity five times higher than that of conventional lithium-ion batteries, and is able to maintain the efficiency of 99 percent for more than 200 cycles.
Until now, the problem with lithium-sulfur batteries has been that the capacity of the sulfur electrode is so large that it breaks apart over cycles of charging and discharging, and the energy advantage rapidly disappears.
To prevent the electrode from disintegrating, the team created bonds between sulfur particles to give them more space to expand and contract, giving the battery greater longevity. The novel technology could drastically reduce the cost of batteries for electric cars and grid energy storage because sulfur is abundant and extremely cheap.
