Almost every portable electronic device today – be it our smartphones or electric vehicles come packed with the widely used lithium-ion batteries. They hold a limited charge, are quite bulky, need charging often and have a modest lifespan. That’s why, researchers have been hard at work to usher the most talked about alternative to lithium-ion batteries, i.e graphene battery.
Instead of diving straight into the world of graphene batteries, let me first tell you about graphene itself. I bet most of us learned in school that carbon exists in many different forms on the Earth, ranging from graphite to diamond. Well, that happens because of the varied arrangement of carbon atoms in different materials. The same is true for Graphene.
The internal structure of a graphene battery is quite similar to that of a standard lithium-ion battery pack. You have 2 electrodes and an electrolyte solution to enable flow of charge, but there’s a notable difference here. One of the electrodes in graphene-based batteries, mostly the cathode, is replaced with a hybrid composite material (solid-state metal + graphene) used in place of a standard solid-state metal.
Researchers are also known to be working on hybrid materials such as Vanadium Oxide (VO2) and graphene, which could also be useful towards improved battery optimization, quick charge and discharge of the battery.
Graphene battery is a new technology, but it doesn’t mean they haven’t been tested. Manufacturers have dedicated quite some time to graphene battery research and why wouldn’t they, especially when it’s superior to the lithium-ion batteries we use right now. So, let’s take a quick look at the benefits of using a graphene battery:
To sum everything up, a graphene battery is going to make for a better choice over a lithium-ion battery in the coming years. It will be remarkably cheaper, smaller, lighter while offering greater electrical storage and faster-charging speeds.
Graphene batteries have a number of benefits but the one shortcoming that’s holding its mass-adoption in our devices is mass production and the costs involved in the same.
Why is it difficult to mass-produce graphene batteries? Well, it’s because of the lack of a feasible technique for the mass-production of high-quality graphene. You certainly could produce graphene at home using graphite and sticky tape, but that doesn’t work for the mass production of the batteries. The lack of the same also drives up production cost as quality of materials will need to be taken into account, which could be as high as tens to thousands of dollars.
Graphene batteries have extraordinary potential and yield results better than the existing battery packs — something that should have become quite clear to you by now. Research in this field has been quite rampant in the past couple of decades, but we will still need to be patient for its commercialization.
Samsung’s Graphene Research
Samsung SDI, the battery manufacturing arm of the Korean giant, is actively working in this field and has seen multiple breakthroughs over the past few years. First, we learned that Samsung had developed ‘graphene balls‘ that could make lithium-ion batteries last longer (while offering 45% increased capacity) and charge 5 times faster.
Additional Research & OEMs
Apart from Samsung, there are a number of battery makers, like CellsX who’re already manufacturing and shipping graphene batteries to its partners. They have designed not only smaller battery packs for power banks (more on this below), but also made bigger batteries for model quadcopters and EVs as well. Huawei has also unveiled a graphene-enhanced Lithium-ion back in 2016 to offer longer operational time and facilitate heat dissipation.
On the other hand, renowned electric car maker Tesla and India’s Log9 are showing an interest in metal-air batteries. They involve the use of a graphene rod as the cathode since it’s porous and lets air pass through. Metal-air batteries can help increase battery efficiency by up to 5 times at one-third the cost, which sounds great.
