Lithium batteries have not been popular for almost thirty years. Over the past three decades, battery technology has essentially stagnated. From dry batteries to lead-acid batteries, and now lithium batteries, although emerging batteries appear in continuous flow, they cannot replace lithium batteries due to some technical problems.
The main reason is that battery research and development takes a long time. For example, when researchers improve a certain part of the battery, they need to conduct a large number of charging and discharging experiments to verify the effect, and each charging and discharging experiment consumes time and resources. The manufacture of batteries, from the laboratory to the production line, is also a long process, although it can be said that it involves development and testing on the production line (lThe test to adjust the battery size involves opening the mold at the production site). line, once, twice, three times... .. It's all money) and requires much more energy and cost than a laboratory.
The higher the material research and development reserves, the more explosive the battery will be. New batteries with large capacity, long life and small capacity have not yet solved a series of problems, such as cost and safety issues. Most of these problems are related to materials. Developing emerging materials is sometimes scratching the a** and is highly accidental. First of all, lithium and sodium are both metals, they are both chemically reactive and react very easily with oxygen in the air etc., but sodium is more reactive than lithium, and the lithium is very unstable. The radius of a sodium atom is much larger than the radius of an atome of lithium, which means that the volume of a sodium ion is much larger than that of a lithium ion.
All batteries have positive and negative terminals. Lithium-ion batteries use lithium ions to move between positive and negative electrodes to achieve the purpose of charging and discharging. The number of moving lithium ions is very large, so the positive and negative electrodes must have enough space to store the lithium ions. The positive electrode of a battery is usually made of lithium and other metal oxides, such as lithium iron phosphate, while the most common material for the negative electrode is graphite (black), which has a unique structure: it is layered, composed of layers of honeycomb Formed by superposition of planes. Smaller lithium ions can slip between graphite layers and form chelates with carbo atomsborn. And this process can be repeated.
Sodium-ion batteries are used more to store energy. They don't seem to be mentioned much in electric vehicles, and they're not hot! However, sodium-ion batteries are widely used in electric vehicles. If you want to replace lithium-ion batteries, unless lithium resources are exhausted! If you want to replace lithium-ion batteries, unless the lithium resource is exhausted. I just talked about solid-state lithium batteries in the last article, and today I will talk about sodium-ion batteries. For sodium-ion batteries.
The physical and chemical properties of lithium, sodium and potassium are similar to those of the alkaline metallic elements in the periodic table. Their physical and chemical properties are similar and they can theoretically be used as carriers of imetal ons for secondary batteries. Lithium has a smaller ionic radius, a higher standard potential, and a much higher specific capacitance than sodium and potassium. It was used earlier and more widely in secondary batteries. However, sodium batteries have long been ignored due to their low capacity and short lifespan due to their three times greater mass of lithium ions. It was not until 2010 that researchers understood this old technology, China's first sodium-ion battery company, Zhongke Haina, was established in 2017.
Lithium resources are scarce and Sodium resources are abundant. The world's reserves of lithium resources are limited, and the content of lithium elements in the earth's crust is limited. With the development of new energy vehicles, the demand for batteries has increased sharply and bottlenecks ine resources gradually appeared. The high cost limits the large-scale application of lithium-ion batteries. Sodium resources are abundant and their abundance in the earth's crust is 440 times greater than that of lithium resources. Sodium resources are widely distributed and easy to exploit. Sodium is gaining increasing attention in the battery field as a substitute for lithium. The principle of operation of sodium-ion batteries is similar to that of lithium-ion batteries. The working principle of sodium-ion batteries also follows the disintegrated type (during the charging process, sodium ions are released from the positive electrode and integrated into it). the negative electrode and the sodium ions embedded in the negative electrode are the more sodium ions return to the positive electrode, the higher the charge capacity when discharging, the process is reverse, the more sodium ions rerotate to the positive electrode, the higher the charging capacity; discharge capacity). The main difference between sodium-ion batteries and lithium-ion batteries lies in the difference between the materials and electrolytes of the positive and negative electrodes, especially the difference between the materials of the positive electrodes.
The energy density of currently mass-produced ternary batteries is generally high, and the high nickel system has obvious advantages over sodium batteries. In terms of lifespan, sodium batteries have a lifespan of more than 3,000 times, which is also much higher than the 300 cycle lifespan of lead-acid batteries. Therefore, in terms of energy density and service life, sodium batteries are expected to replace lead-acid batteries and lithium iron phosphate batteries, mainly in markets such as start-up.e/off, low-speed electric vehicles and energy storage. However, they are difficult. to be applied in the fields of electric vehicles and consumer electronics will remain the dominant choice.