Germany: New Iron Carbon Materials Improve Lithium Storage Capacity of Electric Vehicles

The German Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe recently issued a communique saying that the Institute has used nanotechnology to develop a new type of iron-carbon storage material that can significantly increase the storage capacity of lithium batteries for electric vehicles and reduce the cost of batteries.

The communique said that in order to break through the bottleneck of traditional lithium battery storage, the nanotechnology research institute under the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has been developing a new type of iron-carbon storage that can store more power in a very small electricity storage unit. material. However, the obvious disadvantage of this kind of material is that the charge cycle is not stable. After the battery is charged and discharged many times, the power storage capacity is significantly reduced. For this reason, the researchers switched to a new synthesis method. They mixed and heated several types of raw materials with a lithium salt, thereby creating a new nanostructured material with carbon nanotubes. This method creates electricity storage cells and conductive circuits at the same time on nanoscale materials.

The researchers said that the current stable iron-carbon materials have twice the storage capacity of existing electricity storage materials, and the production process is simple, the cost is low, and its high performance can be maintained for a long time.

Dr. Maximilian Fichtner, who led the study, said that if the research team can fully exploit the potential of this new material, it can increase the storage density of lithium-ion batteries by a factor of five in the future.