5/20/2009 PERMALINK
Using zinc-air battery technology in lithium batteries can increase power ten fold
Imagine a laptop that would go a week between charges or an electric car that could travel 1,000 miles. These could soon become possible thanks to a new battery technology developed by researchers at the University of St Andrews. According to Professor Peter Bruce, combining the air-breathing capacity of a zinc-air battery with standard lithium ion battery technology can produce a lithium-air battery with ten times the power of standard lithium batteries.

The new battery has a much higher energy density than existing lithium ion batteries because it no longer contains dense lithium cobalt oxide. Instead, the positive electrode is made from lightweight porous carbon, and the lithium ions are packed into the electrolyte which floods into the spongy material. When the battery is discharged, oxygen from the air also floods through a membrane (see image, top) into the porous carbon, where it reacts with lithium ions in the electrolyte and electrons from the external circuit to form a solid lithium oxide.