​Nature: Battery energy density exceeds 600 Wh/kg, which will open a trillion-level market

First author: Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan

Corresponding Authors: Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan, Alan H.

Correspondence Units: Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

With this in mind, Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan of Carnegie Mellon University and Alan H.

1.

Interest in battery-powered flight stems from the development of advanced batteries, such as improved aircraft economics, new aircraft utility (flying taxis), or the reduction of aviation’s impact on climate change by reducing carbon emissions

Figure 2.

The economy will have a crucial impact on the viability of electric aircraft

Key battery metrics include volume and weight energy and power density, cost, lifetime and safety

Figure 4.

4.
Potential Electrochemical Solutions

Rechargeable metal anodes, especially lithium metal, are a key factor in achieving high battery voltage and storage capacity
.
Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in improving the Coulombic efficiency and cycle life of Li metal anodes while avoiding the catastrophic internal short circuits associated with dendrites, and these advances are leading rechargeable Li metal technology to maturity and commercialization , it will be possible within the next decade to achieve all the performance indicators required to simultaneously provide electric aircraft
.
Furthermore, pairing nonflammable solid-state inorganic electrolytes with lithium metal anodes is expected to open up new possibilities for safe battery architectures
.
In addition, listed in Table 1 are cathode options (including intercalation and conversion) that can be paired with lithium and non-lithium metal anodes and their performance characteristics, including thermodynamic voltage, number of electrons transferred, theoretical capacity, and theoretical specific energy
.
Table 1 shows that the highest energy densities are associated with so-called conversion reaction cathodes, although conversion reactions are often mechanically complex and require structure control over multiple length scales from the atomic level up in order to obtain theoretically usable storage capacity, these The chemical reaction has the potential to increase the energy density at the material level by a factor of 3 to 5 over current intercalation-based lithium-ion batteries
.

Table 1.
Theoretical indicators of various chemical components

【Document Information】

Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan ^✉ , Alan H.
Epstein ^✉ , Yet-Ming Chiang, Esther Takeuchi, Marty Bradley, John Langford, Michael Winter, The challenges and opportunities of battery-powered flight, 2022.

https://doi.
org/10.
1038/s41586-021-04139-1