Lithium-Air Battery: High Performance Cathodes for Lithium-Air Batteries

BEEST Project: Researchers at Missouri S&T are developing an affordable lithium-air (Li-Air) battery that could enable an EV to travel up to 350 miles on a single charge. Today’s EVs run on Li-Ion batteries, which are expensive and suffer from low energy density compared with gasoline. This new Li-Air battery could perform as well as gasoline and store 3 times more energy than current Li-Ion batteries. A Li-Air battery uses an air cathode to breathe oxygen into the battery from the surrounding air, like a human lung. The oxygen and lithium react in the battery to produce electricity. Current Li-Air batteries are limited by the rate at which they can draw oxygen from the air. The team is designing a battery using hierarchical electrode structures to enhance air breathing and effective catalysts to accelerate electricity production