A comprehensive study on the overall performance of aluminum-air battery caused by anode structure

Abstract

Aluminum-air (Al-air) battery has been regarded as one of the most promising next-generation energy storage devices. In this work, simulation and experimental were both employed to investigate the influence of porous anode structure on discharge performance of Al-air battery. The structure of the aluminum anode was modeled from the pore size of the aluminum anode based on the porous electrode theory.This study was the first work to focus on this point as far as we know. The simulation results revealed that the variation of the pore size of the circular hole affected the discharge performance of the aluminum-air cell and the discharge voltage increased with the increase of the pore size. To further verify the validity of the simulation data, we carried out experiments to verify the characterization of the self-corrosion rate, electrochemical properties and discharge performance of the aluminum anode based on the 3D printing process on the basis of improving the aluminum alloy powder molding quality. The testing results showed an agreement with the simulation analysis results. The minimum discharge voltage was 1.50 V when the circular hole aperture size was 2.0 mm, and the discharge voltage increased by 4.0% and 6.0% for the structured anodes with aperture sizes of 3.0 mm and 4.0 mm, respectively. The results gained in this work provide a novel method for other researchers to further improve the overall performance of aluminum-air batteries.