An international team of scientists from NUST MISIS, Russian Academy of Science and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has found that instead of lithium (Li), sodium (Na) “stacked” in a special way can be used for battery production. Sodium batteries would be significantly cheaper and equivalently or even more capacious than existing lithium batteries. The results of the study are published in the journal Nano Energy.
It is hard to overstate the role of lithium-ion batteries in modern life. These batteries are used everywhere: in mobile phones, laptops, cameras, as well as in various types of vehicles and space ships. Li-ion batteries entered the market in 1991, and in 2019, their inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their revolutionary contribution to the development of technology. At the same time, lithium is an expensive alkaline metal, and its reserves are limited globally. Currently, there is no remotely effective alternative to lithium-ion batteries. Due to the fact that lithium is one of the lightest chemical elements, it is very difficult to replace it to create capacious batteries.
The team of scientists from NUST MISIS, Russian Academy of Science and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, led by Professor Arkadiy Krashennikov, proposes an alternative. They found that if the atoms inside the sample are “stacked” in a certain way, then alkali metals other than lithium also demonstrate high energy intensity. The most promising replacement for lithium is sodium (Na), since a two-layer arrangement of sodium atoms in bigraphen sandwich demonstrates anode capacity comparable to the capacity of a conventional graphite anode in Li-ion batteries—about 335 mAh/g against 372 mAh/g for lithium. However, sodium is much more common than lithium, and therefore cheaper and more easily obtained.
A special way of stacking atoms is actually placing them one above the other. This structure is created by transferring atoms from a piece of metal to the space between two sheets of graphene under high voltage, which simulates the process of charging a battery. In the end, it looks like a sandwich consisting of a layer of carbon, two layers of alkali metal, and another layer of carbon.
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