Chapter 186 The Effect Is Unexpected

It was bright outside the window.

Lu Zhou, who fell asleep on the table at some point, rubbed his eyes, moved his stiff arms, and stood up from the chair.

Then, the first thing he did when he stood up was to walk to the digital microscope impatiently and check the samples under the microscope.

There was no explosion and no smoke.

Seeing that the sample was intact, Lu Zhou was overjoyed, then looked at the computer next to him, and quickly went through the photos he took like flipping through a slideshow.

"It's done!"

Clenching his fists, he almost couldn't hold back the cheers.

From yesterday afternoon to now, he has done four sets of charging and discharging cycles, and none of the lithium dendrites appeared!

Lithium ions flying to the negative electrode did not form white branches, but deposited a layer of moss-like folds under the PDMS material, which were superimposed layer by layer.

Judging from the data on the BK-6808 rechargeable battery tester, not only is there no lithium dendrite formation, but the Coulombic efficiency is also maintained at a very high level!

The good effect surprised Lu Zhou.

He originally thought that at least the combination of PDMS materials and those carbon nanospheres could completely solve the problem of lithium dendrites. Unexpectedly, even if the PDMS material is pulled out alone, the effect is surprisingly good.

As for the role of those carbon nanospheres, Lu Zhou maintained his previous guess. In addition to accelerating the precipitation of lithium ions, they are probably used to "smooth" the wrinkles under the PDMS material.

As for those moss-like "folds", there must be some impact on battery performance, but at least it is much better than the deadly lithium dendrites!

Without those small balls, as the battery continues to charge and discharge, the wrinkle phenomenon will intensify. Although it will not pierce the lithium dendrites, the Coulomb cycle efficiency will definitely decrease, which will reduce the service life of the battery.

Perhaps for advanced civilizations, this flaw is unacceptable, but for any company on earth, this flaw is simply negligible.

Under the premise of safety guarantee, it is the biggest pursuit of the industry to do everything possible to improve the energy density of the battery without reducing the service life of the battery!

It's like someone else's mobile phone is fully charged and can be used for a week of wearing scarves and playing games for a week, but your mobile phone will be red blood after playing for less than half a day when it is fully charged, and the market competitiveness is judged.

Of course, this comparison may be a bit exaggerated. There are many factors that affect battery performance. The specific battery life depends on how the battery and the chip that controls the battery are designed. This part is difficult for Lu Zhou to intervene.

But there is no doubt that this new type of negative electrode material will provide endless imagination for the entire industry!

Whether it is a lithium borate battery or a lithium manganese cobalt oxide battery widely used in the market, the negative electrode is mainly graphite. As for the lithium-sulfur battery still lying in the laboratory, it is kneeling at the feet of the father of lithium dendrite and singing conquest.

Therefore, Lu Zhou is very clear about what the achievements he has made in the past half month mean.

Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes and muttered silently.

"System, what about those carbon nanospheres?"

The system is not responding.

Opening his eyes, Lu Zhou stared at the sample on the microscope and said softly.

"Is that really the case..."

As he expected, the technology contained in those carbon nanospheres has surpassed his level of material science, just like the diaphragm for screening oxygen molecules, and he has not yet had the authority to consult that part of the information.

It doesn't really matter.

The data scanned from Wreckage No. 1 is stored in his computer, and it doesn't necessarily depend on the system to solve everything.

It will be a matter of time before he builds his own laboratory, hires a group of researchers to help him work, and restores the technologies inside one by one.

After unplugging the power, Lu Zhou kept the battery samples under the microscope in a small box prepared in advance.

Immediately afterwards, he saved all the photos on the digital microscope and the data on the BK-6808 rechargeable battery tester to the USB flash drive, and completely destroyed the original data stored on the device.

After cleaning the laboratory and confirming that there was no "interesting" thing left behind, Lu Zhou happily left the laboratory and returned the key to Mr. Wang, who was in charge of managing the laboratory equipment.

Coincidentally, when going out, Lu Zhou met Senior Brother Qian.

Seeing Lu Zhou, Senior Brother Qian greeted him and said, "The experiment is finished?"

Lu Zhou smiled and said, "It's done."

It was just a face-to-face meeting, but Lu Zhou suddenly thought of something and stopped Senior Brother Qian who was about to enter the office.

"By the way, are you researching electrode materials?"

In the second half of last year, when Lu Zhou was helping Professor Li with a project, he heard him talk about some topics related to electrode materials that he seemed to be studying this year.

"Yes," Senior Brother Qian nodded and asked with a smile, "are you interested?"

Lu Zhou didn't answer this question, but instead asked, "What kind of project are you?"

It’s not something worth keeping secret, so Brother Qian replied in a chatty tone: “The positive electrode material of lithium-sulfur battery. The latest research results of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that sulfur can be fixed in mesoporous carbon material as the positive electrode material. Effectively slow down the growth of lithium dendrites on the negative electrode. As for more specific things, I will not say more, and signed a non-disclosure agreement. If you are interested, Professor Li definitely welcomes you to join our team."

"Forget it, academician Lu will definitely not be happy to see me fishing." Lu Zhou smiled, hesitated for a while, and said, "Also, I don't think this is a good choice... what you said I have read a paper, and in fact I am doing similar research.”

After considering the wording in his mind, Lu Zhou continued.

"But I think that if this discovery is really that important, the research team at MIT is unlikely to publish it in a journal so easily, at least not in such a hurry."

A technology that has been disclosed cannot be applied for as a patent, because it will conflict with the "novelty" in the patent laws of various countries.

Although it is not ruled out that those selfless scientific research workers benefit the society, generally those laboratories (mainly engineering) with corporate investment, for high-value scientific research results, usually adopt the method of first registering patents to protect research results, and then publishing papers. mode.

It is very likely that it is not reliable to throw it into a journal so easily, and similar things have not happened before, even in the field of batteries.

Around 2011, a paper on aluminum-ion batteries published by the L-Archer research group of Cornell University in the JECS journal proposed a battery model in which Al was used as the negative electrode and V2O5 was used as the positive electrode. The "breakthrough" progress in the battery industry has been widely reported, and even highlighted by the famous journal "Science".

It's hard to say whether these people have been cheated into funding. In short, the final outcome is that this proved to be an oolong.

At the MRS conference, the Cornell guy was "hung and punched" by a guy named Luke Reed, with convincing stats, and no fight back...

Lu Zhou didn't know whether the research results of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were correct, but he did know that there was no future in researching how to inhibit the growth of lithium dendrites starting from the cathode material.

Because, he has completely solved this problem.

Even, soon to register a patent.

Senior Brother Qian shook his head, and said, "We'll use experiments to test whether it's feasible, and we can't talk about it."

Hearing Senior Brother Qian say that, Lu Zhou could only sigh slightly, and said with a smile.

"Then...good luck to you."

He couldn't reveal more things.

Even if you continue to say it, no one will believe it, and it will easily offend people. What's more, many things cannot be explained clearly at all, and can only be downplayed.

Due to past affection, the reminders he can make can only be limited to the end.

However, he didn't have to worry about what kind of expression he should use to face the old professor and two old teammates who had fought side by side after the paper came out.

If it is the fastest, his patent will not be issued until next year, and then he can start writing papers and submitting papers.

If nothing else, he was already in Princeton by then.

Maybe, by then, maybe Professor Li has given up on this unreliable subject?