Who invented the lithium battery?

Lithium was discovered in 1817 by Alfertson, a student of the Swedish chemist Bezilius, who named it lithium. It was in 1855 that Bunsen and Marchson used the method of electrolytic melting of lithium chloride to obtain the elementary metal lithium, and the industrial production of lithium was proposed by Gensha in 1893. Nowadays, lithium is still produced by electrolysis of LiCl. This method consumes a lot of electric energy, and it consumes as much as 60,000 to 70,000 kWh per ton of lithium refining.

For more than 100 years after his birth, lithium has mainly served the medical community as an anti-gout drug. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was the first to recognize that lithium batteries can be used as a high-efficiency battery. This is because the battery voltage is closely related to the activity of the negative electrode metal. As a very active alkali metal, lithium batteries can provide a higher voltage. For example, a lithium battery can provide a voltage of 3V, while a lead battery has only 2.1V, while a carbon-zinc battery has only 1.5V. According to Pu003dUI, the lithium battery can output higher power under the same current.

As the No. 3 element, lithium that exists in nature is composed of two stable isotopes, 6Li and 7Li, so the relative atomic mass of lithium is only 6.9. This means that metal lithium can provide more electrons than other active metals when the mass is the same. In addition, lithium has another advantage. Lithium ions have a small radius, so lithium ions are easier to move in the electrolyte than other large ions, and can realize effective and rapid migration between the positive and negative electrodes during charge and discharge, so that the entire electrochemical reaction can proceed.

Although metallic lithium has many advantages, there are still many difficulties to overcome in the manufacture of lithium batteries. First of all, lithium is a very active alkali metal element that can react with water and oxygen, and it can react with nitrogen at room temperature. As a result, the storage, use or processing of lithium metal is much more complicated than other metals, and the environmental requirements are very high. Therefore, lithium batteries have not been used for a long time. With the research of scientists, breakthroughs in the technical barriers of lithium batteries one by one, lithium batteries have gradually stepped onto the stage, and lithium batteries have subsequently entered a large-scale practical stage.