Interpretation of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: They developed the world's strongest battery
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[ Instrument Network Instrument Development ] John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino were awarded 2019 The Bell Chemistry Prize in recognition of their contributions to the development of lithium-ion batteries. This rechargeable battery lays the foundation for wireless electronics such as cell phones and laptops. It also makes the world without fossil fuels possible because it is used in almost all areas from electric vehicles to renewable energy storage.
Chemical elements rarely play a central role in the Nobel Prize assessment, but the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has a clear protagonist, lithium, an ancient element that was within a minute of the Big Bang. produced. Until 1817, Swedish chemists Johan August Arfwedson and Jöns Jacob Berzelius from Utö in the Stockholm archipelago Lithium was purified from mineral samples and people only knew it.
Bezerius named this new element in the Greek word "stone" - "lithos". Lithium seems to be very dense in name, but in reality it is the lightest solid element in the world, which is why it is almost impossible to notice the mobile phone that we carry with us.
Lithium is a metal. Its outermost layer has only one electron, which makes lithium have a strong electron donating ability. When lithium loses electrons, it forms a positively charged and more stable lithium ion.
To be precise, the two Swedish chemists did not get pure metallic lithium, but lithium ions in the form of salt. Metallic lithium has caused many fires, especially in the story we are about to tell; lithium is an unstable element that must be stored in mineral oil to avoid reacting with air.
Lithium is very lively, which is its shortcoming, but also its advantages. In the early 1970s, Stanley Whitingham developed the first practical lithium battery by using the enormous energy released by the lithium outer electrons. In 1980, John Goodinav doubled the battery's voltage, creating conditions for producing higher energy density batteries. In 1985, Yoshino Akira successfully replaced the lithium metal in the battery with safer lithium ions, which made the application of the battery practical. Lithium-ion batteries have brought great benefits to humans because they have driven the development of notebook computers, mobile phones, electric vehicles, and solar and wind energy storage.
Now, we are going back 50 years, looking back at the history of the ups and downs of lithium-ion batteries.
In the middle of the 20th century, the number of fuel vehicles in the world increased dramatically, and exhaust emissions exacerbated urban air pollution. Coupled with the growing recognition that oil is a non-renewable resource, it is a wake-up call for automakers and oil companies. In order to survive, they need to invest in electric vehicles and new energy.
Both electric vehicles and new energy sources require batteries that can store large amounts of energy. At the time, there were actually only two types of rechargeable batteries on the market: lead-acid batteries invented in 1859 (still used as starter batteries for fuel vehicles) and nickel-cadmium batteries (which were invented in the first half of the 20th century)
Oil company invests in new technology
The threat of oil depletion led to oil giant Exxon's decision to diversify. In a huge investment in basic research, they recruited some of the most important researchers in the energy field at the time, allowing them to freely do what they wanted, as long as they did not involve oil.
Stanley Whittingham was one of the people who joined Exxon in 1972. He is from Stanford University and his research includes solid materials that store ions using atomic-scale voids. This phenomenon of storing ions is called an intercalation reaction. When the ions are embedded, the properties of the material change. At Exxon, Stanley Whittingham and his colleagues began researching superconducting materials, including bismuth disulfide that can intercalate ions. They doped ions into the bismuth disulfide and studied how the doped ions affect the conductivity of bismuth disulfide.
a material with extremely high energy density
As is often seen in science, this experiment led to unexpected and valuable discoveries. Potassium ions have been shown to affect the conductivity of bismuth disulfide. When Stanley Whittingham began to study the material in detail, he observed that bismuth disulfide has a high energy density. The interaction between potassium and bismuth disulfide contains enormous energy. When he measured the voltage of this material, he found several volts. This is better than many batteries at the time.
Stanley Whittingham quickly realized that it was time to change the direction of research and turn to new technologies that could provide energy storage for future electric vehicles. However, helium is one of the heavy metal elements and does not require a heavier battery on the market, so he replaced it with titanium, which has similar properties but is much lighter.
Lithium in the negative electrode
Shouldn't lithium be the protagonist in this story? Well, lithium, the negative electrode of the new battery invented by Stanley Whitingham, is about to debut. Lithium is not simply picked out as a negative electrode. In a battery, electrons should flow from the negative electrode (anode) to the positive electrode (cathode) during discharge. Therefore, the negative electrode is a material that is easy to lose electrons, and among all the elements, lithium is the most easily lost electron-emitting material.
Ultimately, this rechargeable lithium battery can operate at room temperature and does have a very high voltage. Stanley Whittingham went to the Exxon headquarters in New York to discuss the project. The meeting lasted about fifteen minutes and the management team quickly made a decision: they would use Whitingham's discovery to develop a commercially available battery.
The first batch of rechargeable batteries have solid materials in their electrodes that rupture when chemically reacting with the electrolyte, which can damage the battery. The advantage of Whitingham's lithium battery is that lithium ions are stored in the lattice gap of the titanium disulfide of the positive electrode. When the battery is discharged, lithium ions migrate from the metallic lithium negative electrode to the titanium disulfide positive electrode. When the battery is being charged, lithium ions migrate from the titanium disulfide to the surface of the metallic lithium.
Battery explosion, oil price fell
Unfortunately, the team suffered some setbacks just after starting to produce batteries. As the lithium battery is repeatedly charged and discharged, lithium dendrites are grown on the lithium metal anode. When they grow to the positive pole, the battery can short-circuit, which can cause an explosion. After the fire brigade extinguished several laboratory fires, it eventually had to ask the lab to pay for special chemicals, which were used to extinguish metal-induced fires.
* Translator's Note: In China, fires are classified into six categories A to F, and metal lithium fires are classified as Class D. For such fires, conventional fire extinguishing agents, such as water-based, dry powder, and gas fire extinguishing agents, are not suitable, and special fire extinguishing agents are required.
When the battery whose negative electrode is metallic lithium is charged, lithium dendrites are formed. These lithium dendrites can cause a short circuit in the battery and cause a fire or even an explosion.
To make the battery safer, Whitingham added aluminum to the lithium metal to form an aluminum-lithium alloy and replace the electrolyte in the battery. Stanley Whitingham announced his discovery in 1976, the battery began to produce, and small-scale supply to Swiss watchmakers, they want to use it in solar-powered watches.
The next goal is to increase the size of the rechargeable lithium battery so that it can power the car. However, oil prices plummeted in the early 1980s and Exxon needed to cut spending. Because of the disruption of research and development, Whitingham's battery technology was licensed to three companies in three different regions of the world.
However, this does not mean that research and development has stopped. After Exxon gave up, John Goodinoff took over.
The oil crisis has made Gudinav interested in batteries
When John Goodinav was a child, he suffered from dyslexia, which was one of the reasons he was immersed in mathematics when he was a child. After the Second World War, he was finally attracted to physics. He has worked at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for many years. During this time, he contributed to the development of random access memory (RAM), and until today, RAM is still an essential part of the computer.
Affected by the oil crisis, John Gudinav, like many others in the 1970s, wanted to contribute to the development of new energy. However, the Lincoln Laboratory is funded by the US Air Force and is not allowed to conduct other research at will. So when the University of Oxford hired him as a professor of inorganic chemistry, he seized the opportunity to enter the world of energy research.
Lithium cobaltate creates a high voltage battery
Goodinav had heard about Whitingham’s revolutionary battery. At the time, the battery used a metal sulfide positive electrode. Gudinave’s expertise reminded him of using metal oxide instead of metal sulfide. Can increase the positive potential. Soon, Goodinav and his team set out to find a metal oxide cathode material that could provide high voltage when lithium ions were inserted and that did not collapse when lithium was removed.
The success of this battery system far exceeds the imagination of Gudinaf. Whitingham's battery can produce more than 2V, and Gudinaf found that a battery system with lithium cobaltate as the positive could produce twice the voltage of Whitingham's battery, 4V.
The key to the success of Gudinaf was that he realized that the battery material did not need to be fully charged at the beginning of preparation, but could be charged after preparation. In 1980, he published the study, using this new lightweight cathode material with high energy density to develop high-capacity batteries. This is a crucial step in the move to wireless communications.
Gudinaf began using lithium cobaltate in the positive electrode of a lithium battery. This almost doubles the voltage of the battery, making it more energy-intensive.
Craving for thin and light batteries
With the fall in oil prices, Western countries have reduced their investment in new energy technologies and electric vehicles. However, some Japanese companies are eagerly demanding thin and light rechargeable batteries that can power new electronic devices such as cameras, wireless phones, and computers. Asahi Kasei's Yoshino Akira sharply captured this demand. Or as he said: "I just smelled the changing situation, you can say that I have a good sense of smell."
Yoshino Akira successfully developed the first commercial lithium-ion battery
Yoshino Akira decided to use Gudi Naf's lithium cobalt oxide as the positive electrode and tried various carbon-based materials as the negative electrode to develop a practical rechargeable battery. Researchers have previously discovered that lithium ions can be inserted into the molecular layer of graphite, but at the same time, the structure of graphite is destroyed by the electrolyte. However, Yoshino’s ingenious use of the petroleum industry’s by-product, petroleum coke, successfully solved the problem. Lithium ions are embedded in the petroleum coke anode during charging. When the battery is discharged, lithium ions can migrate to the lithium cobaltate cathode, which has a higher voltage.
The battery developed by Yoshino is stable, lightweight, high-capacity, and capable of generating 4V. The biggest advantage of lithium-ion batteries is that lithium ions can be embedded in the electrodes. The chemical reactions that occur when most batteries are charged and discharged cause a slow change in their electrodes. When a lithium ion battery is charged and discharged, lithium ions migrate back and forth between the electrodes without reacting with surrounding substances. This means that lithium-ion batteries have a long life and can be charged and discharged hundreds of times.
Yoshino Akira developed the first commercially available lithium-ion battery. He used Gudinaf's lithium cobalt oxide on the positive electrode, and on the negative electrode, he used a carbon material, petroleum coke, which can also be embedded in lithium ions. The battery is not based on any harmful chemical reactions. In contrast, lithium ions migrate back and forth between the electrodes, which gives the battery a long life.
Another advantage of lithium ion batteries is that lithium ion batteries do not contain metallic lithium. In 1986, Yoshino was careful to use the explosion test device for battery safety testing. He put a large piece of iron on the battery, but nothing happened. However, when this experiment was repeated with a battery in which the negative electrode was metallic lithium, a violent explosion occurred.
Successful safety testing is critical to the future of lithium-ion batteries. Yoshino said that this is "the moment when lithium-ion batteries are born."
Lithium Ion Battery
- no necessities for a fossil fuel society
In 1991, a large Japanese electronics company began selling the first lithium-ion battery, triggering a revolution in electronic equipment. Mobile phones and computers are light, and electronic devices such as MP3 and tablet computers have emerged.
Subsequently, researchers around the world traversed the elements of the periodic table to develop better batteries, but none of the batteries exceeded lithium-ion batteries in terms of high capacity and high voltage. Of course, lithium-ion battery systems are also undergoing evolution and improvement, including the use of lithium iron phosphate instead of lithium cobalt oxide by Gudinaf, making lithium-ion batteries more environmentally friendly.
The production of lithium-ion batteries has an impact on the environment, but it also has huge environmental benefits. Lithium-ion batteries are driving the development of clean energy technologies and electric vehicles, helping to reduce greenhouse gas and fine particulate emissions.
As a result, the work of Gudinaf, Whitingham and Yoshino Akira has created appropriate conditions for wireless communications and fossil fuel-free society, and has made tremendous contributions to human development.