Materials Engineering for High Density Energy Storage provides first-hand knowledge about the design of safe and powerful batteries and the methods and approaches for enhancing the performance of next-generation batteries. The book explores how the innovative approaches currently employed, including thin films, nanoparticles and nanocomposites, are paving new ways to performance improvement. The topic's tremendous application potential will appeal to a broad audience, including materials scientists, physicists, electrochemists, libraries, and graduate students.

The electrochemical energy storage is a means to conserve electrical energy in chemical form. This form of storage benefits from the fact that these two energies share the same vector, the electron. This advantage allows us to limit the losses related to the conversion of energy from one form to another. The RS2E focuses its research on rechargeable electrochemical devices (or electrochemical storage) batteries and supercapacitors. The materials used in the electrodes are key components of lithium-ion batteries. Their nature depend battery performance in terms of mass and volume capacity, energy density, power, durability, safety, etc. This book deals with current and future positive and negative electrode materials covering aspects related to research new and better materials for future applications (related to renewable energy storage and transportation in particular), bringing light on the mechanisms of operation, aging and failure.

Highlights scientific challenges in developing room-temperature sodium-sulfur batteries Covers pertinent anode, cathode, and electrolyte engineering Provides scientific and technical interpretation for each of the cell components Discusses how Na-S batteries relate to the more extensively researched Li-S batteries Explores importance of the SEI and CEI in developing stable sodium-sulfur batteries

Every electrochemical source of electric current is composed of two electrodes with an electrolyte in between. Since storage capacity depends predominantly on the composition and design of the electrodes, most research and development efforts have been focused on them. Considerably less attention has been paid to the electrolyte, a battery’s basic component. This book fills this gap and shines more light on the role of electrolytes in modern batteries. Today, limitations in lithium-ion batteries result from non-optimal properties of commercial electrolytes as well as scientific and engineering challenges related to novel electrolytes for improved lithium-ion as well as future post-lithium batteries.

The Li-ion battery market is growing fast due to its ever increasing number of applications, from electric vehicles to portable devices. These devices are in demand due to safety reasons, energy efficiency, high power density and long life duration, which drive the need for more efficient electrochemical energy storage systems. The aim of this book is to provide the challenges and perspectives for Li-ion batteries (chapters 1 and 2), at the negative electrode as well as at the positive electrode, and for technologies beyond the Li-ion with the emerging Na-ion batteries and multivalent (Mg, Al, Ca, etc) systems (chapters 4 and 5). The aim is also to alert on the necessity to develop the recycling methods of the millions of produced batteries which are going to further flood our societies (chapter 3), and also to continuously increase the safety of the energy storage systems. For the latter challenge, it is interesting to seriously consider polymer electrolytes and batteries as an alternative (chapter 6).This book will take readers inside recent breakthroughs made in the electrochemical energy systems. It is a collaborative work of experts from the most known teams in the batteries field in Europe and beyond, from academics as well as from manufacturers.

This book covers the most recent advances in the science and technology of nanostructured materials for lithium-ion application. With contributions from renowned scientists and technologists, the chapters discuss state-of-the-art research on nanostructured anode and cathode materials, some already used in commercial batteries and others still in development. They include nanostructured anode materials based on Si, Ge, Sn, and other metals and metal oxides together with cathode materials of olivine, the hexagonal and spinel crystal structures.