The currently
used nickel oxide, is not very efficient, toxic and requires organic solvents to work in the cell.
Not exact matches
To see the way the lithium - ions reacted with the
nickel oxide, the scientists
used a suite of custom - written software to digitally reconstruct the three - dimensional nanostructures with single - nanometer resolution.
«Our water splitter is unique, because we only
use one catalyst,
nickel - iron
oxide, for both electrodes,» said graduate student Haotian Wang, lead author of the study.
Their experiments
used a multilayer thin film comprising palladium,
nickel - iron Permalloy, manganese
oxide and n - silicon.
At the atomic level, in the many batteries that
use lithium -
nickel - manganese
oxide, the manganese and oxygen atoms form orderly rows.
To make the
nickel oxide coating, the researchers
used a technique which involves smashing atoms of argon into a pellet of
nickel atoms at high speed.
CATL is the largest Chinese battery manufacturers but until recently, it has focused mainly on prismatic cell formats
using LiFePo (lithium iron phosphate) and NMC (lithium
nickel manganese cobalt
oxide) chemistry, primarily for electric buses and trucks and energy storage applications.