LITHIUM AIR BATTERY

Today, most electric cars with Lithium ion battery can travel upwards of 200-300 miles on a single change.

Lithium Ion battery (LIB) technology is predicted to reach an asymptotic limit in specific energy of 250 W h kg −1 . This is a hundred times less energy dense than gasoline.

Nowadays, gasoline-powered engines have fuel efficiencies of upwards of 30 miles per gallon. A typical sedan gasoline car with 18 gallon tank can travel up to 500 miles range, doubling that of the average electric car. Therefore, it is imperative to look elsewhere for a solution.

In search for battery technologies that one day could replace LIBs, our researchers have been working on Lithium Air batteries since 2011. We have formed a strategic partnership with Lithium Air Industries, LLC (www.lithiumair.us) to further develop Lithium Air and bring the new battery technology to the market.

AMPTRAN and our partner, Lithium Air Industries, LLC. are the founding members and sponsors of the Battery1000 Consortium

Battery1000 is a consortium with the goal to develop the most advanced battery technology reaching the specific energy of 1,000 Wh/kg, which can power an EV up to 1,000 miles per charge.

The lithium–air battery (Li–air) is a metal–air electrochemical cell or battery chemistry that uses oxidation of lithium at the anode and reduction of oxygen at the cathode to induce a current flow.

In Lithium Air battery, the mass and volume-specific energy densities based on lithium and oxygen are, respectively, around 10 times higher than those of the conventional lithium-ion battery. The calculated specific energy density of gasoline automotive applications is approximately 1,750 Wh/kg using the energy density of gasoline of 13,000 Wh/kg and the tank-to-wheel efficiency of the U.S. fleet of 12.6%.

The non-aqueous rechargeable Lithium Air battery proposed by Abraham and Jiang in 1996 consists of a lithium metal anode, a porous cathode, and a non-aqueous electrolyte and has theoretically high specific energy density of 3,505 Wh/kg.

Oxygen is an advantageous battery storage material as it is freely available from the air and does not need to be carried with the other battery components. Unlike the lithium-ion batteries used today, lithium–air batteries do not require metal oxide cathodes to produce electrochemical power, instead generating power from reactions with oxygen in the atmosphere.

Energy density of a battery cell and the estimated driving distance of Li-ion and Li-Air battery.

Dependence of the energy density of a battery cell on the areal capacity of the electrode for Li–air, Li–S and Li-ion batteries and the estimated driving distance of an electric vehicle with respect to the energy density of the battery cell used.

Unfortunately, today's lithium-air batteries have some pretty serious drawbacks: They waste much of the energy as heat and degrade relatively quickly, lasting only a few charging cycles.

One of the major issues for Li–air batteries is that the developed catalysts exhibit sluggish activity for both oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) or only remain active for one of the reactions (different ORR/OER rates). This can result in high overpotentials – excess energy above its thermodynamic value (2.96 V) – required to form and decompose lithium peroxide (Li2O2) at the cathode during discharge (ORR) and charge (OER) processes, respectively.

A main reason why Lithium Air battery has much higher energy capacity as compared with the lithium ion battery (LIB) is that in a lithium-air cell, energy is stored in the form of covalent bonds rather than via intercalation happening in LIBs. The chemistry of these systems is governed by two catalytic reactions: the OER and the ORR during the charge and discharge cycles, respectively. The development of Lithium Air battery has been hampered by low cyclability and poor energy efficiency. These are essentially due to the poor catalytic activity of electrocatalysts to drive the OER and ORR close to their thermodynamic potential at high rates.

Our research team has focused on the development of new cathode that uses a highly active and stable nanomaterial catalysts to enhance ORR and OER kinetics; and we also designed new electrolyte that can promote the solvent-based growth mechanism for the discharge products.

A preliminary result of our Lithium Air battery has been shown to have energy efficiency of at least 93% in the first 10 cycles, and maintaining the efficiency within 93% to 67% over 1,000 full charge/discharge cycles, with very low discharge and charge overpotentials of approximately 0.13V.

It is achievable for us to develop a Lithium Air battery having at least 3 times more energy specific energy than Lithium Ion battery within 3 years. For comparison, a Tesla Model X with a 85 kWh Lithium Ion battery pack weighs about 1200 lbs can travel up to 300 miles per single charge.

Our Lithium Air Battery pack will provide 255 kWh energy capacity, weighing about 1200 lb and will be able to power our AMPTRAN electric car to travel up 900 miles per single charge.

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