2021 roadmap on lithium sulfur batteries

Abstract

Batteries that extend performance beyond the intrinsic limits of Li-ion batteries are among the most important developments required to continue the revolution promised by electrochemical devices. Of these next-generation batteries, lithium sulfur (Li–S) chemistry is among the most commercially mature, with cells offering a substantial increase in gravimetric energy density, reduced costs and improved safety prospects. However, there remain outstanding issues to advance the commercial prospects of the technology and benefit from the economies of scale felt by Li-ion cells, including improving both the rate performance and longevity of cells. To address these challenges, the Faraday Institution, the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy storage science and technology, launched the Lithium Sulfur Technology Accelerator (LiSTAR) programme in October 2019. This Roadmap, authored by researchers and partners of the LiSTAR programme, is intended to highlight the outstanding issues that must be addressed and provide an insight into the pathways towards solving them adopted by the LiSTAR consortium. In compiling this Roadmap we hope to aid the development of the wider Li–S research community, providing a guide for academia, industry, government and funding agencies in this important and rapidly developing research space.

The impact of propulsive architecture on the design of a 19-passenger hybrid-electric aircraft

“…The design space for the 600 nmi maximum mission range case is shown in the surface graphs of Figure 2, for both turbofan and turboprop hybrid-electric aircraft. As expected, the current State of the Art -SoA batteries technology (approximately 500 Wh/kg [17]) is not sufficient to store enough energy to power a hybridized aircraft of this class, with a DoH greater than 10 %, for the 600 nmi case. For this reason, the design space shown in Figure 2 includes batteries with energy density greater than 750 Wh/kg.…”

Glyme-based electrolytes: suitable solutions for next-generation lithium batteries

“…This reaction involves lithium polysulfide intermediates (Li 2 S x with 2 ≤ x ≤ 8), which dissolve in common electrolyte media for x > 2, giving rise to complex, potential-dependent equilibria between various species with different oxidation states. 136 Accordingly, Li–S cells undergo a gradual cathode loss in the electrolyte solution upon the electrochemical process, which may worsen the cycling performance and typically requires the optimization of a suitable cell design differing from that of conventional lithium-ion batteries. So far, a great deal of effort has been devoted to mitigating the detrimental effects of polysulfide dissolution, which has been regarded as one of the most challenging issues presently hindering practical applications of Li–S batteries.…”

Magnetization dynamics of single and trilayer permalloy nanodots

“…This is analogous with the lattice dynamics, where acoustic mode (AM) corresponds to the in-phase atomic displacement and optical mode (OM) corresponds to the out-of-phase atomic displacement. Such in-phase and out-of-phase modes are found in multilayer thin films 26,27 and nanodots with various shapes. [28][29][30][31] The complex spin wave spectra of multilayered structures can be tuned by changing the thickness of nonmagnetic metal spacer 32 or top layer in symmetric and asymmetric multilayer with the same material.…”