Novel Cathodes for High Capacity Thermal Battery

The current state of the art thermal battery technologies will not be able to meet future requirements that call for higher power and capacity with a smaller footprint. The principal avenue for increasing the capacity of thermal battery is to identify and develop new electrode materials that provide higher specific capacity and power performance. The overall objective of the proposed effort is to develop (design, fabricate, test and demonstrate) novel cathode materials for thermal battery with high single cell potential (>2.5V), high energy density (>1,000 Wh/kg cathode) with current density more than 0.5 A/cm2. In Phase I, we will utilize a judicious combination of experimentation and knowledge of thermal battery systems to establish proof-of-concept for the newly proposed cathode material. CFDRC-developed thermal battery research laboratory, experimental hardware and protocols will be leveraged for the cathode technology development. We will focus on the characterization and demonstration of the proposed thermal battery with novel cathodes through: (1) design and synthesis of cathode materials, (2) development of high voltage electrolytes, (3) fabrication of custom experimental testing cells, and (4) electrochemical testing and characterization of the proposed thermal battery.