CSU team working on boosting lithium-ion battery
Todd Headley• Coloradoan • July 09, 2009

Exciting new research in the chemistry department at CSU has yielded a potential breakthrough in battery technology.

Amy Prieto and colleagues are developing a lightweight lithium-ion battery characterized by an unprecedented power density, capable of charging and discharging power rapidly over an extended lifetime while exhibiting dramatically low capacity loss over thousands of cycles.

The time required to completely charge/discharge the battery is expected to be only a few minutes - a virtually unheard of charge/discharge rate made possible by this nanometer-scale design. Best of all, these performance advantages will not decrease over repeated charge/discharge cycles.

Since their introduction by Sony Corp., lithium-ion batteries have experienced rapid growth and worldwide market penetration.

The major uses for lithium-ion batteries are in consumer electronics (especially laptops, communication and audio/ video devices), industrial uses (military, health care and heavy-duty cordless tools) and high-powered applications within the automotive, aerospace, defense and renewable energy sectors.

Currently the global market is estimated to be $7 billion, and it is expected to surpass $10 billion within three to four years. The automotive market alone is projected to exceed $4 billion by 2015, with more than 1 million plug-in electric hybrid vehicles on the road. This won't happen, however, without a transformational battery technology.

Today's growing need for energy storage drives the requirement for a radical change in battery design and production.

To achieve such critical requirements in lithium battery performance, Prieto and her team have designed a battery intended to address the slow movement of lithium ions into and between the anode and cathode.

This design, which incorporates nanowires, results in a three-dimensional lithium-ion battery and a power density that is orders of magnitude greater than comparable batteries in use today. Further-more, this battery technology and design readily lends itself to low-cost manufacturing and production scale-up.

The realization of this sophisticated battery required the development of cutting-edge enabling technologies. One significant technology is a patent-pending process for the fabrication of the nanowires used in the battery.

As a result of its sophisticated nano-architecture, this new lithium-ion battery is expected to produce performances that are greater than existing batteries and will greatly extend the application space and market.

In particular, the theoretical power density of this new battery has been calculated to be up to 1 million times that of current state-of-the-art batteries based on traditional thin-film designs.

Prieto and her team are working closely with the Clean Energy Supercluster and its business arm, Cenergy, as well as the Colorado State University Research Foundation to help with potential intellectual property and commercialization efforts of this new battery technology.