Experimental Performance Evaluation of a Rechargeable Lithium-Air Battery With Hyper-Branched Polymer Electrolyte

Abstract

Synthesis of hyper branched polymer (HBP) based electrolyte has been examined in this study. A real world lithium-air battery cell was fabricated using the developed HBP electrolyte, oxygen permeable air cathode and lithium metal as anode material. Detailed synthesis procedures of hyper branched polymer electrolyte and the effect of different operation conditions on the real-world lithium-air battery cell were discussed in this paper. The fabricated battery cells were tested under dry air with 0.1mA∼0.2mA discharge current to determine the effect of different operation conditions such as carbon source, electrolyte types and cathode processes. It was found that different processes affect the battery cell performance significantly. We developed optimized battery cell materials upon taking into account the effect of different processes. Several battery cells were fabricated using the same optimized anode, cathode and electrolyte materials in order to determine the battery cells performance and reproducibility. Experimental results showed that the optimized battery cells were able to discharge over 55 hours at over 2.5V. It implies that the optimized battery cell can hold charge for more than two days at over 2.5V. It was also shown that the lithium-air battery cell can be reproduced without loss of performance with the optimized battery cell materials.