Battery electrodes inspired by bamboo

Inspired by a water-carrying membrane inside bamboo that enables it to be the fastest growing plant in the world, researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) are developing more efficient electrodes for batteries that could allow them to be recharged at a much faster rate. Their work has been published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Professor Ziqi Sun, along with a team including Dr Jun Mei, Professor Xiaomin Peng, Dr Qian Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhang and Associate Professor Ting Liao, was inspired by the multilayer membrane that runs up inside the bamboo stem. Prof Sun said this membrane, which is about as thick as a piece of paper, allows the ultrafast transport of water and nutrition up the bamboo, which could grow up to a reported rate of about 40 mm an hour.

He said the membrane is made up of layers, with the layers packed very closely together on the side closest to the inner ring of the bamboo, and further apart on the side nearest the centre of the bamboo. The layers also have a porous structure on the surface, which Dr Mei said deserved an in-depth study.

“The membrane is the most important component in the energy storage devices, and it would be very exciting if we could find a potential material candidate for energy storages by learning from the relationship between the membrane structure and the specific function,” Dr Mei said.

The researchers found this multilevel interlayer structure enabled water and electrolytes to travel through the bamboo in two ways. The inner layered structure, with the confined spacing, enables the superfluidic travel of the liquid and electrolytes, which means the liquid travels very quickly through the plant. The outer layer, with more space between the levels, allows the liquid to be more quickly dispersed through the structure.

This research project builds on previous work about the benefit of two-dimensional nanomaterials for the very fast transport of ions through a battery. Prof Sun explained, “Nature has taught us how to design with these kinds of two-dimensional materials, and how a multilevel distribution of the space will be much more helpful for high-performance batteries.”

The researchers developed a membrane which mimicked the structure of the natural version, layering nanosheets of cobalt oxides and graphene, which individually were about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. The team mimicked the layer structure of the bamboo membrane by applying suction to one side of the sheets. The closest layers were pulled tightly together with a distance of less than 5 nm between them, and with the force of the suction weakening as the layers built up, the outer layers came together with up to 2200 nm between them.

The battery-boosting membrane inspired by bamboo.

The bioinspired membrane they produced, which was 50 mm round and tens of micrometres thick made up of thousands of layers, was examined for its ability to transport ions by placing them into lithium-ion batteries and found to outperform other materials commonly used for electrodes in batteries.

The researchers examined the membrane’s wettability, which is the ability of liquid to maintain contact with a solid surface, and confirmed that the bioinspired membrane showed a superwetting behaviour towards organic electrolyte. This means there was no barrier for the contact and entry of the electrolyte from the surface into the inside membrane.

“The study offers a new principle in designing high-performance energy materials,” Prof Sun said.

“Most importantly, it paves a way for future materials intervention by learning from the greatness of nature.”

Top image: Professor Ziqi Sun was inspired to undertake the project when he walked past a clump of bamboo in the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens.

Please follow us and share on Twitter and Facebook. You can also subscribe for FREE to our weekly newsletter and bimonthly magazine.