New Lithium-Ion Battery Research Puts Tin in Charge

New research from teams in the US and China has continued to drive tin into the spotlight as a simple, cost-effective way to increase the amount of energy that lithium-ion batteries can hold, dramatically increasing the driving range of electric vehicles and enabling more efficient renewable energy storage.

Lithium-ion batteries today rely on copper foil-graphite anode electrodes. Graphite anodes cannot hold enough charge to satisfy the constantly increasing energy demands from electric vehicles, power grids and large-scale energy storage systems that are needed for a greener energy mix, but tin-based anodes can hold up to three times more energy. However, as tin gains and loses charge it expands and contracts in volume by up to 260%, breaking up the electrode and rapidly reducing the amount of energy the battery holds.

The new research is the among the latest to be published from over a decade of R&D highlighting innovative low-cost solutions and opening the way for tin use in lithium-ion batteries.

Scientists at the University of Florida, US simply coated tin with copper to form a robust copper-tin intermetallic layer, limiting the volume change and stabilising the electrode structure. The group found that this approach reduced the rate of degradation of tin by more an order of magnitude.