Chinese researchers have developed a new high-energy lithiumion battery that can operate reliably in temperatures as low as — 60 C, a feat that could significantly improve the performance of electric vehicles and other devices in extremely cold regions.
　　The battery, created by a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, boasts an energy density of 260 watt-hours per kilogram, even in extreme cold. That means it can store a significant amount of energy relative to its weight, ensuring efficient operation in harsh environments.
　　"This battery exhibits remarkable endurance, retaining over 80 percent of its capacity after 500 cycles at a wide range of temperatures," said professor Chen Zhongwei, head of the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis at the institute and leader of the research team.
　　The researchers achieved the breakthrough by addressing several key challenges. They developed a next-generation composite electrolyte that enhances the flow of ions within the battery, especially at low temperatures. And they also incorporated a multi-layer composite electrode structure with a novel semi-solid electrolyte and modified active materials, leading to improved stability and conductivity.
　　Those advances enhanced the battery's ability to perform consistently and deliver power efficiently even in extreme cold, Chen said.
　　The new battery also addresses safety concerns associated with traditional lithium-ion batteries, which primarily use liquid electrolytes, which can leak and ignite, posing a fire risk. The new design utilizes a proprietary semi-solid electrolyte, reducing the liquid component and therefore increasing fire resistance.
　　"This significantly reduces the risk of fire or explosion even under high temperatures," he said.
　　Beyond electric vehicles and outdoor energy storage, the batteries have the potential to revolutionize power supply and storage in various sectors, including aviation, aerospace and polar exploration, Chen added.
　　The research team is aiming to improve the battery's performance. It is developing the next generation with an even wider operational temperature range, targeting stable operation between — 70 C and 70 C and an energy density exceeding 280 Wh/kg.
　　"We are committed to achieving the country's carbon reduction goals and pushing the boundaries of energy technology," Chen said. "Through innovative, multidisciplinary research, we strive to establish China as a world leader in battery innovation."
　　Related link: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202403/07/WS65e92404a31082fc043bb274.html

　　The 2023 Shanghai Cooperation Organization Forum on Traditional Medicine kicked off on Wednesday in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, and is expected to bring more opportunities to the growth of TCM.
　　Under the theme "Heritage, Innovation, Unity and Collaboration for the High-Quality Development of Traditional Medicine Industry", the three-day event has attracted more than 500 Chinese and foreign experts, scholars and entrepreneurs from the medical industry.
　　They will discuss various topics such as the heritage and innovation of traditional medicine and the promotion of high-quality development in the traditional medicine industry.
　　The event is an opportunity to explore more experiences for the development of TCM, according to the organizing committee of Ganjiang New Area in Jiangxi province, where the forum is being held.
　　The new area has laid foundations for driving TCM into a high-quality growth direction, especially after it built the Traditional Chinese Medicine Science and Technology Innovation City, which has attracted numerous industrial projects and high-end scientific research talent since its construction in 2019.
　　One of the notable institutions in the city is the Ganjiang Chinese Medicine Innovation Center, co-established by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ganzhou New District Management Committee. With more than 200 employees, the center aims to tackle key scientific issues in traditional medicine, providing support for research and technological development in the industry.
　　Research results should not only stay in the laboratory but should be practically translated into economic value, according to the Traditional Chinese Medicine Science and Technology Innovation City.
　　By strengthening cooperation with research institutions, the center aims to promote technological innovation and application in the TCM industry, it added.
　　Chen Jianbin, vice-president of Shulei Biotechnology, said that the innovation city has a cooperative and win-win environment with good government services for enterprises and abundant human resources.
　　Jiangxi is known for its age-old history of traditional Chinese medicine and a robust basis for the development of TCM. For instance, Zhangshu in the province is known as the "Pharmaceutical Capital of China" and is renowned for its Chinese medicine industry.
　　Last year, Jiangxi achieved a comprehensive output value of more than 15 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) from medicinal material planting, with a business income of 41.7 billion yuan generated by over 150 large-scale Chinese medicine enterprises.
　　Related link: https://mobile.chinadaily.com.cn/cn/html5/2023-11/30/content_004_6567ab4fed50d203d2ca3843.htm

　　A photo taken on Aug 13, 2023, shows a researcher conducting experiment in the laboratory of Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. (Photo by Xinhua)
　　Chinese scientists recently achieved precise total synthesis of sugar from carbon dioxide in the laboratory, marking a crucial step in artificial sugar synthesis.
　　The synthesis, which took more than two years to realize, was achieved by teams from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology and the academy's Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics.
　　Their research was published last week in a paper in Chinese Science Bulletin, a multidisciplinary academic journal.
　　Sugar is a major source of energy for the human body and a key raw material for industrial fermentation, and it is mainly obtained by extracting it from crops such as sugar cane.
　　However, the traditional method of extraction is limited by the energy conversion efficiency of plant photosynthesis. Moreover, the process of extracting sugar has been affected by uncertain raw material supplies due to land degradation and shortages, ecosystem degradation and extreme weather and natural disasters caused by global warming.
　　As a result, artificial sugar synthesis has been assiduously studied by the scientific community in recent years, and scientists around the world have contributed to the effort.
　　In their latest research, the Chinese scientists adjusted high-concentration carbon dioxide and other raw materials in the reaction solution in accordance with certain proportions. With the help of chemical catalysts and enzyme catalysts, they obtained four kinds of sugars: glucose, allulose, tagatose and mannose.
　　The experiment lasted about 17 hours, much shorter than the time required for traditional methods of sugar extraction, according to Yang Jiangang, lead author of the paper and associate researcher at the Tianjin institute.
　　The efficiency of sugar synthesis in this study was 0.67 grams per liter per hour, which was more than 10 times higher than the previous results achieved by scientists worldwide.
　　Yang said that the carbon dioxide to sugar conversion rate of glucose reached 59.8 nanomoles of carbon per milligram of catalyst per minute. This is the highest level of artificial sugar production known domestically and internationally.
　　The study also achieved precise control of artificial sugar synthesis.
　　"By controlling the varied catalytic effects of different enzymes, theoretically almost any type of sugar can be synthesized," Yang said.
　　Regarding the study, Manfred Reetz, a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, said it is a particularly challenging task to convert carbon dioxide into sugars.
　　Door for green chemistry
　　The achievement by Chinese scientists has provided a flexible, multifunctional and efficient sugar synthesis route, which opens a door for green chemistry, Reetz said.
　　Green chemistry, similar to sustainable chemistry, is a burgeoning field that focuses on how to fully utilize raw materials and energy in the process of producing the intended product while minimizing or eliminating the use and generation of harmful substances.
　　Carbon dioxide to sugar conversion is seen as an example of green chemistry, since it was conducted under normal temperature and pressure conditions and did not yield any harmful substances.
　　Related link: http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202308/24/WS64e697a9a31035260b81de21.html

　　A sudden increase in Earth's atmospheric oxygen content occurred around 2.4 billion years ago and is known as the great oxidation event, but its origin remains an open question. Now, researchers in China have confirmed that the vacuum ultraviolet (UV) dissociation of sulfur dioxide into molecular oxygen and a sulfur atom was probably an important contributor.
　　The team examined sulfur dioxide photolysis at various wavelengths using time-sliced velocity-map imaging (Image by YUAN Kaijun) 
　　Until now, breakdown of CO2 was widely considered the abiotic source of oxygen in our early atmosphere. However, volcanic eruptions that took place before the great oxidation event, in a period known as the Archean eon, produced large amounts of gaseous sulfur dioxide. Although its role as an oxygen source has been studied before, its importance in relation to our current atmosphere was unclear. Kaijun Yuan and his team have now explored this source further by taking advantage of the intense vacuum ultraviolet free electron laser at the Dalian Coherent Light Source in China, a unique tool capable of determining the dissociation pathway of molecules.
　　"Most challenging is the detection of the S(1D) + O2 channel across the entire vacuum UV range, which was not achieved before," explains Yuan. "The experiments in this work applied two independently tuneable vacuum UV laser radiation, achieving vacuum UV photolysis and vacuum UV detection, which provided high detection sensitivity and high resolution." This allowed the team to determine the quantum yield of the S + O2 dissociation channel, enabling them to estimate that around 4.3% of present-day atmospheric oxygen comes from volcanic sulfur dioxide.
　　David Osborn, an expert in atmospheric chemistry from Sandia National Laboratories in the US, says the study provides "solid evidence" that sulfur diocide breaks apart with a 30% yield. However, Osborn warns that its proposed impact on our current atmosphere "seems quite speculative." Whereas Yuan says his team's calculations are likely an underestimate, as sulfur dioxide emissions and the UV flux were both higher in the late Archaean compared to the modern-day values used in their approximations. Incorporating the sulfur dioxide source into complex models of Earth's early atmosphere will be crucial to verify their results.
　　Related link: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/volcanic-sulfur-dioxide-linked-to-oxygen-level-rise-in-earths-early-atmosphere/4017867.article

　　Members of the research team at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in Dalian, Liaoning province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
　　Chinese researchers recently achieved the superionic conduction of negatively charged hydrogen atoms at ambient temperatures, which they say promises to pave the way to advanced clean energy storage and electrochemical conversion.
　　"Materials that exhibit superionic conduction in ambient conditions would provide huge opportunities for new batteries, fuel cells and electrochemical cells", said Chen Ping, a professor at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
　　The study, conducted by a research team led by Chen and associate professor Cao Hujun, was published in the journal Nature on April 5.
　　They were able to create a pure hydride ion conductor with record-high conductivities in the temperature range of-40 to 80 C.
　　As current commercial new energy vehicle batteries do not perform well at extreme temperatures, the breakthrough may help expand the range of temperatures at which batteries can operate, although there's still a long way to go before other high-performance electrode materials to can be found, and a new all-solid-state hydride ion battery can be made, Cao told China Daily on Sunday.
　　Cao said that hydride ion conductors have emerged as promising candidates for energy storage and conversions that allow ions to move without a liquid or soft membrane to separate the electrodes.
　　In recent years, several hydride ion conductors displaying fast hydrogen migration have been developed, but none were able to achieve superionic conduction in ambient conditions until the DICP team took a new approach.
　　The team targeted the structure and morphology of the trihydrides (hydrides containing three atoms of hydrogen per molecule) of certain rare-earth elements.
　　By creating nano-sized grains, defects and other crystalline mismatched zones in a known ionicelectronic mixed conductor, they made it possible to transform lanthanum hydride — a substance synthesized from hydrogen and rare-earth element lanthanum — into a hydride ion superionic conductor.
　　"With fast hydride ion conduction and a high ion transfer number, deformed lanthanum hydride enables a hydride ion battery to operate at room temperature, or lower," said Chen.
　　"This demonstrates the effectiveness of lattice deformation in suppressing electron conduction in rare earth hydrides," she added.
　　The researchers plan to extend the method developed in this study to other hydride materials. Chen said their short-term goal is to demonstrate a new all-solid-state hydride ion battery with practical potential.
　　Related link: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202304/10/WS64336908a31057c47ebb92ec.html

　　Chinese scientists have developed the first superionic hydride ion conductor at ambient conditions, according to the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
　　With strong reducibility and high redox potential, the hydride ion (H-) is a reactive hydrogen species and an energy carrier. Materials that conduct pure H? at ambient conditions will be enablers of advanced clean energy storage and electrochemical conversion technologies.
　　Several H- conductors have already been developed in recent years, but none of the materials could achieve superionic conduction at ambient conditions.
　　The research team targeted the structure and morphology of trihydrides - hydrides containing three atoms of hydrogen per molecule - of certain rare earth elements (REHx), including Lanthanum (La), according to a research paper published in the journal Nature.
　　They innovatively adopted the mechanical ball milling method and deformed lanthanum trihydride (LaHx) through impact and shear force, according to the paper.
　　By creating nanosized grains and defects in the LaHx lattice, the electronic conductivity of LaHx can be suppressed by more than five orders of magnitude. This transforms LaHx into a superionic conductor with record high conductivities at the ambient temperatures -- minus 40 degrees Celsius to 80 degrees Celsius.
　　The researchers plan to explore the physics underneath the phenomenon and extend the method developed in the study to other hydride materials to broaden the material scope for pure H- conductors.
　　Related link: https://english.news.cn/20230407/a6e18e916c964feebf5a335b34cc5ea0/c.html