A lithium-sulfur battery “industrial base” is reportedly planned for construction in Shenzhen, China.
The complex could see a ramping up of battery production to a “large scale” after three to five years, according to the Chongqing Daily.
The paper said the project was announced by Dr. Changming Li (pictured) of the Institute for Clean Energy & Advanced Materials (ICEAM) at Chongqing’s Southwest University.
Li reportedly told the First China-Singapore Frontier Technology Innovation Conference and Youth Scholar Forum in Chongqing that “lithium-sulfur batteries can have as much as six to seven times capacity of traditional lithium-ion batteries”.
Li said: “If the lithium sulfur batteries were applied to mobile phones, their standby time would increase substantially.”
Lithium-sulfur batteries, using sulfur as anode and lithium as cathode, have the advantage of high energy density, small size, and low pollution, Li said. He added that lithium-sulfur is now the subject of increased research in the field of high-energy batteries.
“Although sulfur is non-toxic, environmentally friendly, and low cost, it is electronic and ionic insulators, which make it difficult to be used alone as the anode material,” Li said. “Therefore, we added the conductive graphene materials in the study to apply some of the applications of graphene development.”
The results of the laboratory tests suggested lithium-sulfur batteries currently only have 300-400 cycles, compared to 700-800 cycles of lithium-ion batteries, Li said.
However, Li said other research in this field indicates the cycle life of future lithium-sulfur batteries could be equivalent to lithium-ion batteries.