Sugar Could Be The Sweetest Component in Our Batteries

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Well, we know we like it in our coffee, but I’m not sure how having sugar in our favorite technical gadgets would work out. Yes, you read that properly, sugar is the newest technology fuel. Sugar cubes are components of a new substance that can prevent structures on battery neutrons from degrading and ultimately destroying lithium metal batteries.

Difference Between Lithium and Lithium-Ion:

Lithium is a soft metal and can store greater amounts of energy than electrodes used in lithium-ion batteries. It can allow electric cars to run longer on single charges, and help energy supplies for solar power grids.

Here’s Where it Gets Tricky:

Lithium is highly reactive when it is partnered with regular battery components, leading researchers to making lithium batteries as successful as lithium-ion ones.

Sugar:creativecommons.org

The Team Behind This Sweet Solution:

Researchers at the School for Engineering, Matter, Transport, and Energy at Arizona State University pointed to the inherent fragility with traditional batteries.

They believe that the stress endured within a lithium anode can lead to the development of dendrites, similar to the “whiskers” seen in distressed tin and zinc coatings. This causes batteries to fail because they can short circuit the battery.

Tin whiskers can be compared to straight wires, but lithium dendrite filaments don’t have a straight path formation. Lithium also has a lower melting point at 180 degrees Celsius.

The Solution:

The solution to containing the lithium, and stopping it from meandering and creating dendrites was to surround it with a porous material that would allow breathing room, as well as to prevent dendrite formation.

At the lab, they infused sugar cubes with liquid silicone. Then they dissolved the sugar, which created soft silicone structure. Think of the sugar as a template, which when removed, leaves a substrate that is large and malleable.

This can lead to the potential of making lithium-mental batteries safer, and more conducive to fluctuating temperatures. It also makes them more viable for long-term energy storage.

The Current Test Battery:

As it stands, the battery can hold around 90 per cent of its ability after 100 cycles of stretching to 50 per cent strain. The stretchable battery can be effective enough in wearable communication devices, implantable medical devices, and roll-up displays.

What Makes Them Stand Apart:

The idea was to make the battery stretchable and yet extremely durable. By starting off with sugar cubes, researchers were able to obtain shape, and understand what they needed for the most impactful performance.

The Step-by-Steps of Their Experiment:

First they placed regular sugar cubes on top of a polymer gel in a dish. The dish was then placed in a vacuum, and heated in an oven. Then it was washed, and the sugar dissolved right away. At this point, the polymer gel took place of the sugar, resulting in stretchable polymer sponges.

The polymer sponges were filled with a conductive graphene-based solution to create sponge electrodes. It’s this very porous architecture that makes it stretchable, and gives it mechanical prowess, and fast sodium-ion transport. Let’s not forget large storage capacities.

Related:

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About Author

Nadia Zaidi is a freelance multimedia journalist whose work is featured in several print and digital publications. She previously developed and hosted a show on youth issues for community television, and produces short-documentaries for public outreach. She holds a bachelor's degree in Journalism from Ryerson University.

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