In today's world of power lithium batteries, how far are we from graphene batteries?
Since the first mass-produced electric car in 1884, people have been making unremitting efforts to improve battery capacity, but from the perspective of the technology tree timeline, battery technology has been slower than the development of other technologies. After the emergence of smartphones, the lack of battery life on the use of cell phones has become more and more obvious, a rechargeable battery, which has become a burden on all cell phone users.
In order to protect the normal user experience, battery manufacturers have also been improving the production process of lithium batteries, but the speed of battery material improvement is much lower than the speed of the rise in power consumption of other components. Cell phone thickness/performance/endurance has become an unsolvable triadic paradox, two of which must be discarded.
The tool to improve the energy density of lithium batteries
In 2004, physicists Andrei Heim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester, UK, successfully separated graphene from graphite with tape in an experiment, confirming the existence of this versatile material. Both of them were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which shows the importance of graphene to the world.
In a narrow sense, graphene is a single layer of two-dimensional crystals composed of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice with sp2 hybridization orbitals, and in a broader sense, a graphite structure with up to 10 layers can also be called graphene. This material is the world's thinnest known material, with a single layer thickness of only 0.34 nm.
It is not only the world's hardest material with the highest thermal conductivity, but also the world's least resistive material, with an electron mobility of over 15,000 cm2/V-s at room temperature, making it an ideal battery material.
Currently there are two major directions in graphene battery technology, one is as an anode inlaid with lithium ions, and the other is as a conductive agent exists. As an electrode material can be considered an improved version of the traditional lithium battery. Traditional lithium batteries have been using multiple layers of graphite as the inlay structure. If graphite is divided into a single-layer structure (graphene), the theoretical capacity of a lithium battery with graphene as the anode would be more than twice the capacity of a conventional lithium battery (>744 mAh-g -1).
For cell phone batteries, such a battery is nearly fantastic. Imagine what would happen to the functionality of your phone if you could charge it for three days.
The ultimate solution for battery fast charging technology
The importance of graphene for lithium batteries is not only that, graphene as the highest thermal conductivity of the material, if the use of graphene for lithium battery heat dissipation, lithium battery fast charging speed can be raised again a step. In the 56th Japan Battery Conference in 2015, Huawei showed the technology of using graphene to dissipate heat for Li-ion battery, and demonstrated the results of fast charging technology that can fully charge 3000mAh battery 48% in 5 minutes.
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If graphene heat dissipation is combined with graphene as the positive electrode of the battery, the capacity and charging speed of lithium batteries will be improved at the same time.
In 2017, Samsung announced that it had developed a battery with graphene technology. In Samsung's demonstration, this cell phone battery with graphene technology has a 45% increase in capacity, while it can also be fully charged in 12 minutes, a powerful battery performance that shows the potential of graphene batteries in electronic products.
The savior of electric vehicle range experience
Even Tesla, with its ternary lithium battery, is unable to achieve a comparable experience with fuel cars, but graphene can change this embarrassing situation. 2014, a Spanish graphene startup called Graphenano and the University of Colorado collaborated to develop the world's first graphene Graphenano, a Spanish graphene startup, and the University of Colvado collaborated in 2014 to create the world's first graphene polymer battery, which can power an electric car for up to 1,000 kilometers in less than 8 minutes, showing how much graphene can improve battery capacity and charging speed.
If all future electric cars use graphene batteries that can be fully charged in 10 minutes, the electric car range problem will no longer exist, and fast charging stations will replace gas stations. If the owner can get out of the car and go to the toilet, then the electric car will be as convenient as the fuel car.
Technology still on the road to industrialization
Whichever way you look at it, graphene for is the key to a breakthrough in lithium batteries. But graphene, as a new material, is still a bit too young. Whenever humans discover a new material, they always follow the process of principle research-laboratory production-scale production-product.
Unlike other disciplines, materials science has a long experimental cycle from principle to product. From the current manufacturing and application degree of graphene, graphene is still in the early stage, although the global graphene market size has been $273 million in 2018, and the average annual growth rate is also maintained at a high growth rate of 40%, but most of the enterprises producing graphene have not mastered the technology of large-scale mass production of graphene, and the produced high-purity graphene materials are sold at more than $1000 per gram.
Such expensive materials, at most in the laboratory research to appear, if you want to commercialize, not to mention the technology and production enough, the price of light I'm afraid no one to buy. Graphene technology is still in the pre-industrial stage, I'm afraid it will take three to five years before it can appear in electronic products.
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