With the making of an entirely new porous aluminum, Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd has enhanced the capacity of lithium-ion (Li-ion) rechargeable batteries and capacitors. This certainly appears good news for manufacturers and dealers of products which use Li-ion rechargeable batteries. Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd is a leading Japanese producer of items like cables, semiconductor equipments and the other alike things. The invention, which is a new porous aluminum, has been named as “Aluminum-Celmet”.
Before Aluminum-Celmet, Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd has been producing a porous metal of nickel (Ni) called “Celmet”. Aluminum-Celmet is significantly beneficial to the products using Li-ion batteries and capacitors. Because, by using it as collectors, the battery capacity gets three times more.
The porous metal depicts a mesh-like structure, with the presence of spherical pores in the mesh-like structure of “Aluminum-Celmet”. This exceptional porosity enables the metal to be framed into different shapes as per the need. Sumitomo has cleverly applied the same production technique in producing “Aluminum-Celmet” as was used for “Celmet”. The “Celmet” had the disadvantage that it could not be used for Li-ion rechargeable batteries and capacitors owing to its low corrosion resistance. As “Aluminum Celmet” has high corrosion resistance, this disadvantage is removed. The Li-ion batteries and capacitors have higher charge/discharge voltages than NiMH rechargeable batteries.
For the readers’ acquaintance, it would be worth mentioning that at present, aluminum (Al) foil and copper (Cu) foil are used to make the positive and negative electrodes of current collectors of Li-ion batteries. Aluminum-Celmet is supposed to replace the Al foil which will go to increase the amount of positive active material per unit area. In case of automotive batteries, this can increase battery capacity by 1.5 to 3 times. Besides, even if the capacity remains unchanged, the volume of the battery can be reduced to 2/3 or even 1/3.
Aluminum-Celmet can find easy applicability and so the manufacturers have decided to speed up the process of its production by setting up a small-scale production line at Osaka Works. The demand for a product like the porous metal aluminum can increase once the applicability of the product is established in the market.
Via: Techon
