It was dawn outside the window.
Lu Zhou, who had fallen asleep on the table, rubbed his eyes and stretched his stiff arms. He then stood up from his chair.
Then, the first thing he did when he stood up was to walk to the digital microscope and check the sample under the microscope.
There was no explosion and no smoke.
When Lu Zhou saw that the sample was intact, he was overjoyed. He then looked at the computer next to him and quickly looked through the photos.
"It's done!"
He clenched his fists and almost couldn't help but cheer.
From yesterday afternoon until now, he had done a total of four sets of charging and discharging cycles, and there were no lithium dendrites!
The lithium ions that flew to the negative electrode did not form a white tree branch. Instead, a layer of moss-like folds was deposited under the PDMS material and stacked up layer by layer.
From the data on the BK-6808 rechargeable battery tester, not only were there no lithium dendrites, but the Coulomb efficiency was also maintained at a very high level!
The results were so good that Lu Zhou was surprised.
He originally thought that he would have to combine the PDMS material with the carbon nanospheres to completely solve the lithium dendrites problem. He did not expect that even if he pulled out the PDMS material alone, the results would still be amazing.
As for the role of the carbon nanospheres, Lu Zhou maintained his previous guess. In addition to accelerating the lithium ion precipitation rate, they were probably used to "flatten" the folds under the PDMS material.
As for the moss-like "folds", it definitely had an impact on the performance of the battery, but at least it was much better than the deadly lithium dendrites!
Without the carbon nanospheres, the continuous charging and discharging of the battery would exacerbate the folding phenomenon. Although it would not penetrate the lithium dendrites, the Coulomb cycle efficiency would definitely decrease, which would reduce the battery life.
Perhaps for an advanced civilization, this flaw was unacceptable. However, for any company on Earth, this flaw was negligible.
Under the premise of ensuring safety, the battery life would not be reduced, and the energy density of the battery would be increased as much as possible. This was the biggest pursuit of the industry!
It was just like how other people could spend a week scrolling through Weibo and playing games with a fully charged phone, but your phone could only be charged for half a day before it went red. The difference in market competitiveness was obvious.
Of course, this comparison might be a little exaggerated. There were many factors that affected the performance of a battery. The specific battery life depended on the design of the battery and the chips and other components that controlled the battery. It was difficult for Lu Zhou to intervene in this part.
But there was no doubt that this new anode material would provide endless imagination for the entire industry!
Whether it was the widely used lithium borate battery or the lithium manganese cobalt battery, the negative electrode was mainly graphite. As for the lithium-sulfur battery that was still lying in the laboratory, it was kneeling at the feet of the lithium dendrite daddy.
Therefore, Lu Zhou knew very well what the results he had achieved in the past half a month meant.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and muttered.
"System, what do we do with those carbon nanospheres?"
The system did not respond.
Lu Zhou opened his eyes and stared at the sample on the microscope.
"Sure enough …"
Just like he expected, the technology contained in those carbon nanospheres was beyond his material science level. Just like the oxygen molecule screening membrane, he did not have the authority to access that part of the information.
It did not matter if he passed or not.
The data from Debris No.1 was stored in his computer, so he did not have to rely on the system to solve everything.
Once he built his own laboratory, he would hire a group of researchers to help him restore the technology one by one. It was only a matter of time.
Lu Zhou unplugged the power and placed the battery sample under the microscope in a small box that he prepared in advance.
Then, he saved the photos on the digital microscope and the data from the BK-6808 rechargeable battery tester into a USB drive. As for the original data on the device, he completely destroyed it.
After he cleaned up the laboratory and confirmed that there was nothing "interesting" left, Lu Zhou happily left the laboratory and returned the key to Professor Wang, who was in charge of the laboratory equipment.
Coincidentally, when Lu Zhou left the laboratory, he bumped into Brother Qian.
When Brother Qian saw Lu Zhou, he said, "Done with the experiment?"
Lu Zhou smiled and said, "Yep."
Lu Zhou suddenly thought of something and stopped Brother Qian, who was about to enter the office.
"Oh yeah, are you guys researching electrode materials?"
In the second half of last year, when Lu Zhou was helping Professor Li with a project, he heard that Professor Li was going to research electrode materials this year.
"Yeah," Brother Qian nodded and asked, "Are you interested?"
Lu Zhou did not answer the question. Instead, he asked, "What project are you guys working on?"
It wasn't something worth keeping secret, so Brother Qian replied in a casual tone, "The positive electrode material for lithium-sulfur batteries. The latest research results from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology University found that fixing sulfur in mesoporous carbon materials as positive electrode materials can effectively slow down the growth of lithium dendrites. As for the specifics, I don't want to say more. I signed a confidentiality agreement. If you're interested, Professor Lee will definitely welcome you to join our team. "
"Forget it, Professor Lu won't be happy if he sees me slacking off." Lu Zhou smiled and hesitated for a while. He then said, "Also, I don't think this is a good choice … I've read the thesis you mentioned. In fact, I'm doing similar research."
Lu Zhou thought about the words in his mind and spoke.
"But I think that if this discovery is really that important, the research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology University wouldn't publish it so easily, at least not in such a hurry."
Technology that had already been published could not be used as a patent application because it would conflict with the "novelty" of the patent laws of various countries.
Although there were some selfless scientific researchers who benefited society, generally, those laboratories with corporate investment (mainly engineering) would usually register the research results for high-value scientific research results before publishing the thesis.
Throwing it into a journal so easily was very unlikely to be reliable. Similar things had happened before, even in the field of batteries.
Around 2011, the L-Archer research group at Cornell University published a paper on aluminum-ion batteries in the journal JECS. They proposed a battery model with Al as the negative electrode and V2O5 as the positive electrode. It was widely reported as a "breakthrough" in the battery industry, and it was even highlighted by the famous journal Science.
It was hard to say whether or not these people cheated funding, but the end result was that it turned out to be a mistake.
At the MRS Conference, the people from Cornell University were "beaten up" by a young man named Luke Reed with convincing data, and they could not fight back …
Lu Zhou did not know whether the research results of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were correct or not, but he knew that there was no future in researching how to inhibit the growth of lithium dendrites from the positive electrode material.
Because he had completely solved this problem.
He was even going to register a patent.
Brother Qian shook his head and said, "We will use experiments to test whether it is feasible or not, we can't just talk about it."
When Lu Zhou heard Brother Qian say this, he could only sigh and speak with a smile.
"Then … Good luck."
He couldn't reveal anything more than that.
No one would believe him, and it would offend people. Not to mention, there were a lot of things that could not be explained at all.
Due to their past relationship, he could only give her a few reminders.
However, he didn't have to worry about how he was going to face his old professor and his two old teammates after the thesis was published.
He would have to wait until next year to apply for the patent, and then he would be able to start writing and submitting the thesis.
If everything went according to plan, he would already be in Princeton by then.
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