Porous silicon oxide electrodes can fix durability issues in batteries: Researchers

Tokyo: A team of researchers from Doshisha University in Japan on Saturday said that porous silicon oxide electrodes offer a breakthrough towards sustainable energy storage.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) can be found virtually everywhere. However, current battery designs suffer from some crippling drawbacks, including low durability and the use of toxic liquid electrolytes.

Although silicon-based all-solid-state batteries should be theoretically more durable than conventional LIBs, an unsolved challenge still stands before this becomes a reality.

According to researchers, when a Si-based all-solid-state battery undergoes charge/discharge cycles, the negative Si electrode repeatedly expands and contracts.

This puts a lot of mechanical stress on the interface between the electrode and the stiff solid electrolyte, causing the former to ultimately crack, detach, and suffer an irreversible dip in performance.

In the paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the researchers investigated whether adding pores to a silicon oxide electrode could prevent the cracking and peeling problems caused by the expansion and contraction seen in Si electrodes.

Interestingly, the highly porous electrodes offered much better cycling performance compared to non-porous ones, which suffered from a massive capacity drop after cycling.

“We expect the results of our research to make a multifaceted contribution towards sustainable development goals, not only in terms of climate change countermeasures based on the reduction of carbon emissions, but also in terms of economic growth and urban development,” said Professor Takayuki Doi from Doshisha University.

Taken together, the findings of this study shed light on how porous structures can be leveraged to unlock the true potential of all-solid-state batteries.

Such energy-storing devices will play a crucial role in charting our path towards sustainable societies, given their promising applications in domestic and industrial-scale energy generation, said researchers.

Further studies will be needed to fully optimise the porous structure to achieve maximum performance in all-solid-state batteries, they added.