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At the 241st National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), scientists made claims that the next generation battery might be 3-D. The battery is a new lithium-ion battery with a three dimensional interior architecture that could be great for the electric cars that are starting to hit the market. The new lithium-ion battery is already available as a prototype. The 3-D lithium-ion battery recharges in only minutes, a big improvement from the batteries that take hours to charge. These new batteries might make it possible for electric cars to recharge as fast as a gas powered vehicle fills up at the gas station. According to scientists, the 3-D battery could potentially be the start for more powerful, longer-lasting batteries for all sorts of other rechargeable electronic devices.

The research team has a 3-D prototype, which is about the size of a cell phone battery. It takes around 12 minutes to recharge compared to 2 hours for a conventional lithium-ion battery. The battery can be discharged more than double as many times as a conventional lithium ion battery at high discharge rates.

Research at Colorado State University is aimed at improving lithium-ion batteries, which currently outperform nickel-cadmium (NiCad) batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have twice as much energy per ounce as nickel-cadmium batteries. Their high cell voltage of 3.6 volts allows for the battery pack designs to have only 1 cell, and there is no memory effect that hurts a lithium-ion batteries ability to recharge to full capacity.

A basic change in the battery’s interior is the solution to improving the batteries performance. Conventional lithium-ion batteries are made up of graphite, which is a form of carbon that serves as the anode (negative electrode), a lithium compound that serves as the cathode (positive electrode), and an electrolyte that separates the electrodes. The electrodes are arranged in multiple thin layers. Lithium-ions, which are electrically charged particles of lithium, move from the carbon anode through the electrolyte to the lithium cathode during discharge and back when recharging. The configuration has a downside; the lithium-ion batteries tend to recharge slowly, have a limited life of 2 years, and demand special built-in circuits to prevent overheating.

In order to solve these problems, researchers did some reconfiguring whereby they replaced the graphite anode with nanowires of copper antimonide, which is a metallic material made up of copper and antimony. The nanowires have an enormous surface area and are capable of storing twice as many lithium ions as the same amount of graphite per unit volume. The nanowires are also more chemically stable and heat resistant than graphite. The prototype 3-D battery is around the size of a cell phone battery.

Tests have shown that the first prototype could recharge in less than 12 minutes, and have double the lifespan of existing lithium-ion batteries. Commercial versions of the battery would be thinner and lighter than conventional lithium-ion batteries, because the 3-D version holds more lithium per unit volume.

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