Scientific breakthrough could make electric cars travel 1,000 km on a single charge

Scientists have used an inexpensive material to improve battery performance.

One of the challenges in the transition from gasoline cars to electric vehicles is range. After all, electric cars can now travel only a few hundred kilometers on a single charge. The authors of the study, published in the journal Advanced Science, say they have a formula that will significantly increase the range. Scientists claim they can increase the average range of electric vehicles to 1,000 km per charge and even more. The secret of the formula lies in an element such as silicon, writes IFLScience.

Silicon is considered a good element for making batteries due to its wide availability. But silicon has the not very good property of expanding during charging. Silicon cells can expand to three times their size during charging and then shrink again. That's why engineers don't really like highly expanding battery cells, no matter how good they are.

For this reason, silicon in batteries has been considered in the form of nanoparticles, which give them many advantages and reduce disadvantages. But the production of these nanoparticles is a very complex and costly process.

The authors of the new study decided to work with silicon particles that are about 1000 times larger than nanoparticles. They are easier to produce and have a higher energy density. However, the main problem remained - the expansion of silicon during battery charging. But scientists found a way out.

The researchers used a gel polymer electrolyte that can deform during charging due to changes in the size of the silicon. But simply getting silicon particles into the gel will not help - they must be bonded at the chemical level. For this reason, the mixture of gel and microparticles was irradiated with an electron beam. This allowed the creation of covalent bonds between them, which provided better stability while at the same time smoothing out the effects of expansion.

As a result, the scientists produced batteries that were more stable and had similar properties to conventional lithium-ion batteries, but they had a 40% increase in energy density. Scientists say new research brings them closer to creating a stable lithium-ion battery with high energy density. The study's authors believe that the process of producing such a battery is so simple that the method is ready for use. Now it remains to be seen how this method will actually work in a full-size battery.