New type of glass material could boost smartphone battery life: study

Researchers have discovered a new type of glass material that could be used as an electrode in lithium-ion batteries to almost double a smartphone's battery life.

The material discovered by ETH Zurich researchers led by Dr Semih Afyon and Reinhard Nesper could potentially double battery capacity. The material Vandadate-borate glass is being used by researchers as a cathode material.

The material comprises vanadium oxide (V2O5) and lithium-borate (LiBO2) precursors, and was coated with reduced graphite oxide (RGO) to enhance the electrode properties of the material.

The researchers used a vanadium-based compound as vanadium a transition metal exhibited various oxidation states, which could be exploited to reach higher capacities.

Afyon and his colleagues blended powdered vanadium pentoxide with borate compounds to make the material.

According to the reasearch, borate was used to form glass, which is the reason borate compounds were used and the resulting glass compound was a new kind of material, neither V2O5 nor LiBO2 in the end.

After melting the powder at 900 degrees Celsius the researchers cooled the melt as quickly as possible to form glass.

The resulting paper-thin sheets that were thus produced were crushed to a powder before use, as this increased their surface area and created pore space.

Meanwhile, gizmag.com reported that various challenges had to be overcome to find a material that could both store battery capacity effectively and take a frequent number of charge cycles, while staying stable enough to be viable for use in modern-day electronics.

Chief among the challenges was harnessing the potential of vanadium-based compounds, which could take more charge than materials currently used in cathodes, but become unstable after a few charge/discharge cycles due to their crystalline structure.

To address the issue, the researchers mixed powdered vanadium pentoxide with borate compounds to create vanadate-borate glass – a material with a high capacity and stable structure that, according to Afyon, and was also simple and inexpensive to manufacture.

According to Afyon, what was needed was new chemistry to obtain safe, better and longer-lasting batteries. He added that the vanadate-borate glass compound his team had developed could extend smartphone battery life by 1.5 to 2 times and allow electric cars to travel 1.5 times further, though these numbers were still theoretical projections as of now.