CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new collaborative study co-led by an Oregon State University researcher shows that the use of iron could be the key in creating more affordable and environmentally friendly lithium-ion batteries, college officials said.
OSU officials said that a study published on May 23 in the scientific journal Science Advances shows that iron could be used instead of cobalt and nickel as a cathode material in lithium-ion batteries. Half of the cost of making a lithium-ion battery is in the cathode and the use of iron as a far more readily available material would also provide for greater safety and sustainability, researchers said.
“We’ve transformed the reactivity of iron metal, the cheapest metal commodity,” said Xiulei ‘David’ Ji, a chemistry researcher at OSU. “Our electrode can offer a higher energy density than the state-of-the-art cathode materials in electric vehicles. And since we use iron, whose cost can be less than a dollar per kilogram – a small fraction of nickel and cobalt, which are indispensable in current high-energy lithium-ion batteries – the cost of our batteries is potentially much lower.”
Ji said that predicted shortages of nickel and cobalt could halt battery production as its currently done due to soaring global demand for these materials to meet lithium battery manufacturing needs as the transportation sector electrifies its vehicle product lines. Energy storage efficiency still needs to be improved as not all of the electricity put into the battery is available for use upon its discharge, but, once those improvements are made, the end result will be a battery that works much better than those currently in use while costing less and being more environmentally friendly, OSU officials said.
“If there is investment in this technology, it shouldn’t take long for it to be commercially available,” Ji said. “We need the visionaries of the industry to allocate resources to this emerging field. The world can have a cathode industry based on a metal that’s almost free compared to cobalt and nickel. And while you have to work really hard to recycle cobalt and nickel, you don’t even have to recycle iron – it just turns into rust if you let it go.”
College officials said that the study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences program. Researchers with Vanderbilt University, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory collaborated with OSU on the study, the university said.
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