Lithium-air batteries have become a hot research area in recent years. They hold the promise of drastically increasing power per battery weight, which could lead, for example, to electric cars with a much greater driving range.
But bringing that promise to reality has faced a number of challenges, including the need to develop better, more durable materials for the batteries’ electrodes and improving the number of charging-discharging cycles the batteries can withstand.
Now, MIT researchers have found that adding genetically modified viruses to the production of nanowires that can serve as one of a battery’s electrodes could help solve some of these problems.
The researchers produced an array of nanowires, each about 80 nanometers across, using a genetically modified virus called M13, which can capture molecules of metals from water and bind them into structural shapes. In this case, wires of manganese oxide were actually made by the viruses. But unlike wires 'grown' through conventional chemical methods, these virus-built nanowires have a rough, spiky surface, which dramatically increases their surface area.
One of the researchers, MIT's Professor Angela Belcher explains that this process of biosynthesis is similar to how an abalone grows its shell — in that case, by collecting calcium from seawater and depositing it into a solid, linked structure.
The increase in surface area produced by this method can provide a big advantage in terms of a lithium-air battery's rate of charging and discharging. But the process also has other potential advantages, according to Professor Belcher. Unlike conventional fabrication methods, which involve energy-intensive high temperatures and hazardous chemicals, this process can be carried out at room temperature using a water-based process.
Also, rather than isolated wires, the viruses naturally produce a three-dimensional structure of cross-linked wires, which provides greater stability for an electrode.
A final part of the process is the addition of a small amount of a metal, such as palladium, which greatly increases the electrical conductivity of the nanowires and allows them to catalyse reactions that take place during charging and discharging. Other groups have tried to produce such batteries using pure or highly concentrated metals as the electrodes, but this new process substantially reduces the quantity of expensive material that is needed.
Altogether, these modifications have the potential to produce a battery that could provide two to three times greater energy density than today’s best lithium-ion batteries, a closely related technology that is today's top contender, the researchers say.
Belcher emphasizes that this is early-stage research, and much more work is needed to produce a lithium-air battery that’s viable for commercial production. This work only looked at the production of one component, the cathode; other essential parts, including the electrolyte — the ion conductor that lithium ions traverse from one of the battery’s electrodes to the other — require further research to find reliable, durable materials.
Moreover, while this material was successfully tested through 50 cycles of charging and discharging, for practical use a battery must be capable of withstanding thousands of these cycles.