Lithium-Air Cells with High Capacity Cathodes

Abstract

Lithium-air batteries consist of lithium anodes electrochemically coupled to atmospheric oxygen through an air cathode. Oxygen gas introduced into the battery through the air cathode is essentially an unlimited cathode reactant source. The theoretical specific energy of the Li-oxygen cell with 3 V is 5.4 kWh/kg, and that excluding oxygen is 11.5 kWh/kg, the highest for a metal air battery. Having previously developed a high capacity cathode for lithium-air cells, the current focus is on packaging the cell components, and testing the cells performance. Our improved air cathode structures have specific capacities approaching 4000 mAh/g of carbon. The specific capacities are over 250% greater than the highest specific capacities reported in literature. In this paper we briefly review the cathode design, discuss cell packaging, and report lithium-air cell performance data.