School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA.
Science. 2011 Oct 7;334(6052):75-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1209150. Epub 2011 Sep 8.
The identification of similarities in the material requirements for applications of interest and those of living organisms provides opportunities to use renewable natural resources to develop better materials and design better devices. In our work, we harness this strategy to build high-capacity silicon (Si) nanopowder-based lithium (Li)-ion batteries with improved performance characteristics. Si offers more than one order of magnitude higher capacity than graphite, but it exhibits dramatic volume changes during electrochemical alloying and de-alloying with Li, which typically leads to rapid anode degradation. We show that mixing Si nanopowder with alginate, a natural polysaccharide extracted from brown algae, yields a stable battery anode possessing reversible capacity eight times higher than that of the state-of-the-art graphitic anodes.
鉴定具有应用价值的材料和生物体的材料需求的相似性，为利用可再生自然资源开发更好的材料和设计更好的器件提供了机会。在我们的工作中，我们利用这一策略来构建基于高容量硅（Si）纳米粉的锂离子电池，以提高性能。硅的容量比石墨高出一个数量级，但在与锂进行电化学合金化和脱合金化时，它会发生剧烈的体积变化，这通常会导致阳极迅速降解。我们表明，将硅纳米粉与从褐藻中提取的天然多糖藻酸盐混合，可得到稳定的电池阳极，其可逆容量比最先进的石墨阳极高 8 倍。
