Elsevier

Carbon

Volume 167, 15 October 2020, Pages 596-600
Carbon

Letter to the editor
Nanotubes make battery lighter and safer

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2020.06.042Get rights and content

Abstract

A common battery platform made of inorganic nanotubes is proposed and developed. Sponge-like papers of conductive carbon nanotubes and insulative boron nitride nanotubes are used as current collector and separator, respectively. The electrode/separator stack, enlarging active material content to 93.6% and functioning without any problem after heating at 500 °C, opens a door for lighter and safer batteries.

Section snippets

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank BNNT, LCC for the BNNT powder sample. This work is financially supported by Grand-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant number JP16H06368). We thank Dr. Mochen Li for the nitrogen volumetric adsorption measurement. The TG-DTA analysis was conducted at Materials Characterization Central Laboratory, Waseda University.

Cited by (8)

  • Appropriate properties of carbon nanotubes for the three-dimensional current collector in lithium-ion batteries

    2023, Carbon Trends
    Citation Excerpt :

    Submillimeter-long CNTs with only a few walls have been used in such self-supporting electrodes, where the CNTs played multiple roles, as the binder, conductive filler, and current collector, enhancing the mass fraction of the active materials and enabling stable charge-discharge cycles of a pouch cell (50 mm × 50 mm) with a support of lightweight combs instead of heavy foils of metal [8]. The CNT-based electrode architecture has been effective for conventional active materials, such as graphite for the negative electrode and lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) for the positive electrode [8, 12], and emerging high-capacity active materials such as silicon [13–15] and sulfur [15–18]. A CNT-based sulfur positive electrode showed high performance because of its enhanced electrical conduction pathways and high gravimetric and volumetric capacities attributed to the lightweight and flexible nature of the porous CNT sponge [16]; however, a CNT-based silicon negative electrode provided low Coulombic efficiency because of electrolyte decomposition and low volumetric capacity, which were attributed to the highly porous structure [15,16].

  • Fabrication of CoSe@NC nanocubes for high performance potassium ion batteries

    2021, Journal of Colloid and Interface Science
    Citation Excerpt :

    Therefore, the major challenge for development of high performance PIBs is to explore the appropriate anode material with high capacity and cycling stability. Recently, researchers have designed a series of multifunctional composite materials with complex morphology to solve the volume change effect of K+ (de)intercalation [16-21]. Besides, the confinement of electrode active materials into carbonaceous structures has been considered as an effective strategy.

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text