"One Charge for 800km"... Development of the World's Highest Performance All-Solid-State Battery

KAIST-Georgia Tech Joint Research Team

Not directly related to specific expressions in the article. [Photo by Getty Images Bank]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] Domestic researchers have developed the world's highest-performance all-solid-state battery capable of running 800 km on a single charge.

KAIST announced on the 13th that Professor Kim Beom-jun's research team from the Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Lee Seung-woo's team at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, developed a new concept elastomer polymer electrolyte and realized the world's highest-performance all-solid-state battery.

KAIST research team that developed the world's highest performance all-solid-state battery. From the left: Professor Seungwoo Lee, Professor Beomjun Kim, Researcher Junghoon Han, Researcher Seunghoon Lee. Photo by KAIST.

The all-solid-state Li-metal battery replaces the highly volatile liquid electrolyte used in secondary batteries with a solid electrolyte, making it a future technology that can prevent fires and automotive safety accidents. Compared to the currently commercialized lithium-ion battery (Li-ion battery), it dramatically improves energy density, enabling longer driving ranges for vehicles and solving safety issues, making it a "dream battery technology."

The research team developed an elastomer (rubber) type polymer electrolyte that exhibits excellent lithium (Li) ion conductivity at room temperature and mechanical elasticity. They applied this to an all-solid-state battery, achieving the world's highest performance with an energy density of 410 Wh/kg in an all-solid-state lithium metal battery. Introducing this technology could enable electric vehicles to run up to 800 km on a single charge (currently about 500 km). It is also expected to significantly improve the safety of lithium-ion batteries using conventional liquid electrolytes.

Solid electrolytes are broadly categorized into polymer-based, oxide-based, and sulfide-based electrolytes. Currently, sulfide-based electrolytes are the most actively researched but have the disadvantage of being very expensive. Polymer-based solid electrolytes have the advantages of very low raw material costs, low-temperature mass production processes, and light weight, but suffer from low ionic conductivity at room temperature and reduced stability during battery charge and discharge.

The research team developed an elastomer polymer solid electrolyte by three-dimensionally connecting plastic crystalline materials with very high lithium ion conductivity inside an elastomer with excellent rubber-like elasticity. The electrolyte developed by the team has an ionic conductivity of 10^-3 S/cm, about 100 times higher than the representative polyethylene oxide (PEO)-based polymer electrolytes. Additionally, the rubber-like elastic electrolyte suppresses the growth of lithium dendrites, which is the biggest issue affecting stability during battery charge and discharge, thereby securing excellent battery performance and stability.

The developed polymer electrolyte demonstrated stable operation at high voltages above 4.5 V in an all-solid-state battery composed of a thin lithium metal anode and a nickel-rich cathode (NCM-Ni83), achieving the world's highest energy density of over 410 Wh/kg.

Professor Kim said, "Through this research, we not only developed the world's highest-performance all-solid-state battery, called the battery of the future, but also secured core material technology by developing a completely new type of solid electrolyte called elastomer electrolyte, which is fundamentally different from existing ones." He added, "The elastomer electrolyte developed in this study dramatically improves the problems of existing solid electrolytes and has a very simple manufacturing process, so it is expected to be a game changer for electrolytes in all-solid-state batteries."

The research results were published in the international journal Nature on the 13th.

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