The human arsenal has always been more expansive than all recognizable limits, and yet it still hasn’t seen an element more significant than that tendency of improving at a continuous clip. This tendency to grow, no matter the situation, has brought the world some huge milestones, with technology emerging as quite a major member of the group. The reason why we hold technology in such a high regard is, by and large, predicated upon its skill-set, which guided us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look beyond the surface for a second, it will become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired from the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component, in fact, did a lot to give the creation a spectrum-wide presence and initiate a full-blown tech revolution. Of course, this revolution then went on to scale up the human experience through many unique avenues, but even after achieving a feat so notable, technology will somehow continue to bring forth the right goods. The same has turned more and more evident in recent times, and assuming one new discovery ends up with the desired impact, it will only put that trend on a higher pedestal moving forward.

The researching team at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering has successfully developed a scalable method to optimize prelithiation, a process which mitigates lithium loss and improves battery life cycles by coating silicon anodes with stabilized lithium metal particles (SLMPs). You see, while trading graphite for silicon anode batteries have the potential to revolutionize energy storage capabilities and bolster the prospects of our electric vehicle landscape, it continues to suffer from one major problem of lithium ions depletion. Basically, when used alongside the battery, silicon can form a solid-electrolyte interphase or SEI layer that actually consumes lithium. On a deeper note, the stated layer is formed once the electrolyte in a battery cell reacts with electrons and lithium ions, resulting in a nanometer-scale coating of salts deposited on the anode. This layer then insulates the electrolyte from the anode, and as a result, keeps the reaction from continuing. Although SEI can break apart during subsequent charges, it has the means to reform on its own, and on every appearance, it was found to damage battery’s lithium reserve in an irreversible manner. Fortunately, the researching team succeeding in getting past the hurdle through the prelithiation method, which improves SEI stability and cuts back on the ions that are depleted on its reappearance.

“Prelithiation is a strategy designed to compensate for the lithium loss that typically occurs with silicon. You can think of it in terms of priming a surface, like when you’re painting a wall and you need to first apply an undercoat to make sure your paint sticks. Prelithiation allows us to ‘prime’ the anodes so batteries can have a much more stable, longer cycle life,” said Sibani Lisa Biswal, an engineer at The Rice Lab of Chemical and Biomolecular.

Following some initial tests of this method, the researchers discovered that spray-coating the anodes with a mixture of the particles and a surfactant improves battery life by 22% to 44%. Furthermore, battery cells that boasted a greater amount of coating achieved higher stability and a lengthier cycle life.

Still, one might argue how prelithiation isn’t exactly a novel concept, but a counter point would be that, unlike its previous iterations, the concept here can be seamlessly integrated into existing big-scale battery manufacturing procedures. Apart from it, Biswal pointed out another unique aspect in the development by saying:

“One aspect of the process that is definitely new and that Quan (Quan Nguyen, a chemical and biomolecular engineering doctoral alum and lead author of the study) developed was the use of a surfactant to help disperse the particles. This has not been reported before, and it’s what allows you to have an even dispersion. So instead of them clumping up or building up into different pockets within the battery, they can be uniformly distributed.”