The Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology announced that they have jointly developed a technology to increase the driving ranges of electric vehicles to 1,000 km and the technology is based on the use of a ceramic material in a lithium-air battery.

A lithium-air battery is an ultra-light battery in which oxygen is used as a positive electrode material whereas existing lithium-ion batteries use transition metal alloys as the same material. The former’s energy storage capacity is more than 10 times that of the latter. In addition, since it uses oxygen instead of the metal, it is much more advantageous in terms of weight reduction. This is why lithium-air batteries are in the spotlight as next-generation electric vehicle batteries.

The institutes succeeded in dealing with the battery’s chronic problem that its service life is affected by the active oxygen that is generated during its operation. They extended the service life of the battery more than 10-fold to at least 100 charges and discharges by replacing the organic material in the battery with a novel high-performance ceramic material synthesized by supercomputer-based quantum physics modeling.

The ceramic material, which is a mixed conductor, is capable of conducting both lithium ions and electrons and replacing both the conductive material and the electrolyte in the battery. The supercomputer was provided by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information and details of the research were published in Advanced Energy Materials in Nov.