The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) is developing cell design technology that can improve the energy density of secondary batteries by approximately 20%, and is expected to contribute significantly to the realization of high-energy density secondary batteries.

ETRI announced on the 12th that it has presented a new secondary battery cell design method that eliminates the entire collector, and that the excellence of the technology has been proven when it was published online in 'Advanced Energy Materials', a top international academic journal in the field of energy materials, on October 22nd.

The current collector helps electrical reactions occur between the negative and positive electrodes when the secondary battery is charged and discharged.

On the other hand, the high density of the entire collector also caused an increase in the weight of the battery.

Accordingly, research is being conducted in the industry to minimize the thickness of the entire collector.

ETRI researchers have proposed an innovative electrode design method that directly applies electrodes onto a separator without a current collector.

In addition, the applicability of this design has been further increased by applying an environmentally friendly and cost-competitive water-based process.

Furthermore, in order to uniformly apply the electrode on the separator with low wettability to water, polyvinyl alcohol (polyvinyl alcohol) is used in the aqueous process.ol) A polymer binder was used.

Through joint research with Korea University, the research team theoretically verified that this polymer can increase interfacial stability.

In addition, the newly proposed electrode structure allows the electrolyte to pass through smoothly, unlike the existing one, making it possible to design a new type of battery by stacking the new electrodes in multiple layers.

Through this, the research team confirmed that energy density can be improved by approximately 20% compared to existing secondary batteries.

In addition, the newly developed electrode design has been confirmed to have advantages such as improving the safety of the separator, increasing the recyclability of the electrode, and facilitating the analysis of electrochemical reactions within the electrode.

ETRI Senior Researcher Kim Joo-young, who is in charge of the research, said, “This is the result of efforts to develop a type of battery platform that can be used to improve the energy density of secondary batteries. This research is especially meaningful because it was conducted through the Next Generation Leading Researcher Project, which supports and discovers ETRI’s new researchers.”

This study was conducted with the support of the Ministry of Science and ICT's step-by-step carbon-neutral technology development project and the Global TOP Strategic Research Group based on the ETRI Next-Generation Key Player New Research Project.

It was conducted through joint research with the research teams of Professor Yong-Joo Kim of Korea University and Professor Yong-Min Lee of Yonsei University, hosted by ETRI.

The first authors of the paper are ETRI Senior Researcher Jooyoung Kim and Korea University Researcher Minyoung Seo.