Date: 2024-09-21 hits: 150
Recently, major mobile phone brands have released new products intensively. In this season's new mobile phone products, "silicon negative electrode battery" has become a selling point that various brands are focusing on creating.
The product manager of OPPO Find series revealed that the OPPO Find X8 series will adopt CATL Glacier Battery across the entire range. Huawei announced at its new product launch event that the Mate XT, a three fold phone, uses the "world's thinnest silicon negative electrode high-capacity battery". The previous Honor Qinghai Lake battery, Xiaomi Jinshajiang battery, and vivo Blue Ocean battery are all silicon negative electrode batteries.
Silicon negative electrode batteries have become a common choice for new mobile phones. Currently, silicon negative electrode batteries have been widely used in the fields of consumer electronics and electric power.
In the field of consumer electronics, taking the foldable screen trend of mobile phones as an example, the demand for lightweight and high specific energy of batteries in electronic products such as mobile phones has become increasingly prominent, in order to flexibly adapt to changes in the appearance of electronic products.
The theoretical capacity of silicon material is as high as 4200mAh/g. Mixing it into the stone negative electrode can directly increase the energy density of the battery, providing longer battery life for electronic products with limited volume.
It is said that a super large capacity silicon-based negative electrode battery with a capacity of 6000mAh will become a standard configuration for domestic mobile phone brands such as OPPO, Huawei, Rong, Xiaomi, and vivo in the future. Huawei's new three fold Mate XT features three independent batteries placed in three different body parts, forming a massive 5600mAh battery pack to ensure longer battery life.
Silicon based negative electrode batteries have also been widely used in fields such as power tools and small drones. Especially in applications driven by high rate cylindrical batteries, silicon-based negative electrodes are commonly used in their battery products. In this field, companies such as EVE Energy, BAK Battery, and New Energy An have shown strong growth momentum in the shipment of lithium batteries for electric tools.
Although silicon-based negative electrode batteries have achieved strong penetration in the above-mentioned fields, power batteries are a more demanding application scenario for cycling and cost. When introducing them into the field of power batteries, silicon-based negative electrodes still face two core challenges: cycling performance and engineering.
Firstly, there is the issue of cycling performance. Astatine based negative electrode materials are prone to volume expansion and contraction during charging and discharging, leading to structural damage and performance degradation of the battery. Therefore, improving the cycling performance of silicon-based negative electrode batteries is the key to introducing them into the field of power batteries. Recently, companies are discussing ways to improve material structures, optimize electrolytic wave formulations, and other methods to enhance the cycling performance of silicon-based negative electrode batteries.
Among them, CVD porous silicon carbon has been a concentrated attempt by silicon-based negative electrode enterprises in the past two years, and has accelerated its introduction into the market in recent years. This porous silicon carbon negative electrode technology, which originated overseas, improves the problem of material structure decomposition and failure during charge and discharge of astatine based negative electrodes by adding silicon nanoparticles into the pores of porous carbon precursors to form silicon carbon composite materials with carbon as the support structure.
Even though this route can reduce expansion and improve cycling, according to feedback from the power battery end, battery companies still hope to further control the expansion of silicon-based negative electrodes.
Secondly, silicon-based negative electrodes still face significant challenges in terms of engineering, which also affects the cost reduction of silicon-based negative electrodes as expected. Especially in the production of CVD porous silicon carbon, the hazardous gas silane gas is involved, and the preparation and selection of carbon skeleton are also difficult, with high technical barriers. It is understood that the hundred ton level is the threshold for the scale of this route.
Another preparation method for sanding nano silicon carbon requires achieving both extremely fine nanoscale silicon powder and uniform dispersion, making it equally difficult to engineer
Overall, the silicon-based negative electrode industry is capable of meeting the demands of consumer electronics, power tools, and other fields in terms of material performance and production scale. However, in the face of the larger application market of power, whether it is to increase the blending ratio or expand the penetration scale of silicon-based negative electrodes, continuous breakthroughs are still needed in the selection of technical routes, product expansion control, and cycling performance. In the future, we will see more high-performance and long-lasting smart devices emerge.
