Materials challenges in rechargeable lithium-air batteries
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Introduction The need to store electricity is becoming increasingly critical to link energy supply to our energy demands as we shift from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Advances in the past two decades in electrochemical energy storage technologies such as Li-ion batteries have enabled the ubiquity of mobile electronic devices in our lives. The expansion of electrified transportation to driving ranges of ∼300 miles per recharge, as offered by vehicles based on internal combustion engines, and the use of intermittent solar and wind energy for stationary power applications call for storage technologies with much greater gravimetric energies than Li-ion batteries. Energy storage schemes that involve the transfer of multiple electrons during discharge such as lithium-air1 and zinc-air batteries,2 as well as Li-S batteries (see the Nazar et al. article in this issue), can provide higher gravimetric energies than Li-ion batteries that are constrained largely to one-electron intercalation.1–3 Although the basic principle behind the operation of metalair batteries (or more accurately metal-O2 since only the O2
drawn from the air is used; other reactive constituents [e.g., CO2] need to be excluded to a sufficient level) is well known, there are immense challenges to overcome in order to make these technologies practical and to do so with a battery that delivers the promised step-change in energy storage. In this article, we discuss some key materials challenges and highlight recent advances in Li-O2 battery research. The operation of Li-O2 batteries is based on the conversion of stored chemical energy in lithium (fuel) and oxygen into electrical energy via the formation of reaction products containing lithium ions and reduced oxygen species.4–6 This scheme incorporates operational elements of a fuel cell (e.g., reduction of gaseous O2 from the environment during discharge) with that of a battery (storage of electrons and Li+ in the oxygen electrode), and therefore represents a departure from conventional constraints of Li-ion positive electrode development. Li-O2 batteries differ from Li-ion batteries in that rather than intercalating lithium into a host lattice containing transition metal ions (see the Introductory article in this issue), oxygen is reduced to solid Li2O2, filling the pore
D.G. Kwabi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; [email protected] N. Ortiz-Vitoriano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; [email protected] S.A. Freunberger, Graz University of Technology, Austria; [email protected] Y. Chen, University of St. Andrews, UK; [email protected] N. Imanishi, Mie University, Japan; [email protected] P.G. Bruce, University of St. Andrews, UK; [email protected] Y. Shao-Horn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/mrs.2014.87
© 2014 Materials Research Society
MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 39 • MAY 2014 • www.mrs.org/bulletin
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MATERIALS CHALLENGES IN RECHARGEABLE LITHIUM-AIR BATTERIES
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