NICOP - Development and Investigation of Metallurgical-Grade Silicon as a Low-Cost and High-Capacity Anode Material for Li-ion Batteries
Abstract
Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIBs) are the most popular batteries to power everyday mobile devices. The global LIB market is forecasted to reach US$ 14.3 billion by 2020. Significant research efforts have been directed toward improving LIBs~ performance. Graphite, the current state-of-the-art anode, has a limiting theoretical capacity of 372 mAhg-1. Recently, silicon (Si) has attracted a great deal of attention as an alternative anode material because it can store up to 10 times more energy compared to graphite without any additional weight. This is a very significant boost for military operations.Currently, silicon is mainly produced at a purity of 99.9999% to meet the demand of the semiconductor industry. However, we hypothesize that silicon with a much lower purity, specifically metallurgical-grade silicon, can be used as an anode material for LIBs because particular metallic impurities can aid in increasing the electrical conductivity of the silicon anode; thus, achieving a LIB with superior capacity at a much lower cost.Our preliminary experimental results show that metallurgical-grade (49%) Si anode is electrochemically active with a relatively high specific capacity of 614.3 mAhg-1 and a stable cycle up to 10 cycles. Moving forward, we will define the characteristics of the metallurgical-grade Si and the purity specifications. We will investigate the effect of impurities on the performance of lithium-ion battery. This step is essential in decreasing the processing cost of Si anode while boosting the battery~s performance. We will also develop an optimized ball-milling process for synthesizing nanostructured metallurgical-grade Si. The ultimate objective is to demonstrate an excellent cycle life (>50 cycles) of the metallurgical-grade Si using half-cell configuration (vs. Li metal).The proposed project is directly responsive to the ONR Focus Area: ~Power and Energy~ to develop efficient power and energy systems. Dr. Hongtan Liu, University of Miami, will be the sole US collaborator. The desired outcomes of this research is 1 journal article and 1 conference presentation/poster.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 05, 2017
- Source ID
- N629091712053
Entities
People
- Saif Almheiri
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy