With the goal of eliminating the shortcomings of modern lithium-ion battery anodes, a group of engineers from the Korea Maritime and Oceanic University and Busan National University reported in an article for the Chemical Engineering Journal that they had developed an anode material with unique structural characteristics that overcome many of the existing barriers to increasing anode efficiency.
Kyiv. Ukraine. Ukraine Gate – July 26, 2021 – Technology
In their work, Korean scientists focused on manganese selenide (MnSe), a widely available transition metal compound known for its high electrical conductivity and used in the development of semiconductors and supercapacitors. However, MnSe undergoes an abrupt (almost 160%) change in volume during charge-discharge, which not only reduces the performance of the electrode but also creates safety problems.
The researchers developed a simple and inexpensive way to compensate for this volume change: they uniformly embedded MnSe nanoparticles into a three-dimensional porous carbon nanosheet matrix (3DCNM). This carbon skeleton not only protected the fixed MnSe nanoparticles from sudden volume expansion but also endowed them with numerous additional advantages, such as a large number of active centers and an increased contact area with the electrolyte.
The best of the variants of such a material synthesized by the authors, which showed the highest cyclic stability and the charging / discharging rate in tests, continued to demonstrate excellent electrochemical properties (including the kinetics of lithium-ion and electron transport) when operated as part of a prototype battery with a lithium/manganese oxide cathode.
The team is encouraged by the potential for their achievement: “Using a conductive filler base, we have developed an anode that improves battery performance while providing reversible energy storage. This strategy can be applied to obtain other transition metal selenides with a large surface area and stable nanostructure, with applications in energy storage systems, electrocatalysis, and semiconductors. “
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Source: Ukrgate