Polymer discovery paves way for low-cost ultrafast batteries
Release date: 2015/4/13 21:26:44
April 07, 2015 // Paul Buckley
Researchers at the University of Houston have developed an efficient conductive electron-transporting polymer that should allow ultrafast battery applications.
The polymer exhibits the fastest charge-discharge performance for an organic material under practical measurement conditions, allowing a battery to be 80 percent charged within six seconds and fully charged in another 18 seconds.
The discovery relies upon a 'conjugated redox polymer' design with a naphthalene-bithiophene polymer, which has traditionally been used for applications including transistors and solar cells. With the use of lithium ions as dopant, the researchers found it offered electronic conductivity and remained stable and reversible through thousands of cycles of charging and discharging energy.
The discovery, described in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, solves on a decades-long challenge for electron-transport conducting polymers, suggested Yan Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UH Cullen College of Engineering and lead author of the paper.
Researchers have long recognized the promise of functional organic polymers, but until now have not been successful in developing an efficient electron-transport conducting polymer to pair with the established hole-transporting polymers. The lithium-doped naphthalene-bithiophene polymer proved both to exhibit electronic conductivity and to be stable through 3,000 cycles of charging and discharging energy.
The research could lead to a cheaper alternative to traditional inorganic-based energy devices, including lithium batteries. Ultimately, Yao said, it could translate into less expensive consumer devices and even less expensive electric cars.Yanliang Liang, a research associate at UH and first author on the paper, said researchers are not trying to compete directly with conventional lithium-ion batteries.
Liang pointed out that conventional inorganic metal-based batteries and energy storage devices are expensive partly because the materials used to make them, including cobalt and silicon-based compounds, require large energy expenditures to process. Organic polymers can be processed at relatively low temperatures, lowering the cost.
The organic polymers also produce less CO2. And while conventional materials are finite, organic polymers could potentially be synthesized from biomass.
Organic -conjugated polymers are emerging as a materials class for energy-related applications, enabling a path to a more sustainable energy landscape without the need of energy-intensive, expensive and sometimes toxic metal-based compounds, concluded the researchers. A model polymer, P(NDI2OD-T2), was stably and reversibly n-doped to a high doping level of 2.0, a significant progress for electron-transporting -conjugated polymers. With rational molecular design, -conjugated redox polymers will establish new design space in polymer chemistry and see wide-spread applications, especially in energy-related ones such as batteries, supercapacitors and thermoelectrics.The basic polymer used in the work was discovered in 2009; Yao said it was provided by members of the research team from Polyera Corporation, a technology company based in Illinois in the USA. Although naphthalene-bithiophene has been used for transistors and other applications since its discovery, this is the first time it has been converted for use in energy storage.
That was done through the addition of lithium and raised the polymers doping level from a previously reported 0.1 to 2.0.
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