Principle of Energy Storage in Liquid Lithium-Ion Batteries

Conventional academic views generally attribute the energystorage mechanism of liquid lithium-ion batteries to the reversible formation and fracture of lithium carbon chemical bonds, and regard chemical bond energy as the main carrier of battery energy. This paper re-examines the complete microscopic evolution of charging and discharging for liquid lithium-ion batteries, focusing on analyzing the microscopic binding effect of graphite anode on lithium ions. This paper clarifies that the graphite lattice has binding force yet with weak energy level as a whole. The observed reversible intercalation deintercalation phenomenon during charge discharge cycles is not a genuine chemical bond reaction, and merely represents a weak shared coupling effect between lithium ions and free electrons of graphite. Lattice weak binding and weak electronic coupling only serve to temporarily immobilize lithium ions and maintain spatial charge separation, and do not undertake the main energy storage function. The main energy stored inside a battery comes from macroscopic electric potential energy formed by charge separation between the positive and negative electrodes, rather than chemical bond energy or lattice potential energy. Based on the weak binding microscopic mechanism, this paper reasonably explains the microscopic origin of slow self discharge during standing, the thermal runaway prevention mechanism relying on current limiting of external controllers, constructs a complete physical energy storage image of lithiumion batteries, and puts forward targeted material modification and future research directions.