Unlocking the Potential of Cation-Disordered Oxides for Rechargeable Lithium Batteries

In today’s lithium batteries, those cathodes are usually made of an orderly crystalline material, sometimes in a layered structure. When slight deviations from that perfect order are introduced, the battery’s efficiency generally goes down — so disordered materials have mostly been ignored in the search for improved battery materials.

But it turns out this correlation is far from universal: Certain kinds of disorder can provide a significant boost in cathode performance, the researchers have found through a combination of computer modeling and laboratory experiments. These surprising findings are reported this week in the journal Science, in a paper by MIT graduate student Jinhyuk Lee, professor of materials science and engineering Gerbrand Ceder, and four others.

disordered_materials

Conventional layered lithium and transition metal cathode material (top) and the new disordered material studied by researchers at MIT (bottom) as seen through a scanning tunneling electron microscope. Inset images show diagrams of the different structures in these materials. (In the disordered material, the blue lines show the pathways that allow lithium ions to traverse the material.)

Links

You can read the full news article here:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/disordered-materials-hold-promise-for-better-batteries-0109.html

or download the Sciencexpress report from this link (requires access):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/01/08/science.1246432

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