Battery Technology

Concerns about the scarcity of lithium and other materials necessary in the now ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries have recently driven many researchers to look for alternatives, such as sodium and potassium. Professor Shinichi Komaba from Tokyo University of Science, Japan, and his team have worked for over a decade on this topic. In his latest review…

Scientists have uncovered a root cause of the growth of needle-like structures—known as dendrites and whiskers—that plague lithium batteries, sometimes causing a short circuit, failure, or even a fire. The team, led by Chongmin Wang at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has shown that the presence of certain compounds in the electrolyte—the…

  Lithium ion is probably the most advanced technology available for the packs of rechargeable batteries you’ll buy this holiday season. The batteries also power the vast majority of consumer devices, electric vehicles, and grid storage systems. Despite their ubiquity, lithium-ion batteries have disadvantages. Metals used in the batteries are becoming expensive and one crucial…

In the 1970s, M. Stanley Whittingham proposed an initial concept of lithium-ion batteries that use LixTiS2 as cathode and lithium metal as anode materials, where intercalation effects were demonstrated with a small lattice expansion [1]. In 1979-1980, John B. Goodenough discovered that the transition metal LixCoO2 at the cathode produces a potential as high as…

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Mellon College of Science and College of Engineering have developed a semiliquid lithium metal-based anode that represents a new paradigm in battery design. Lithium batteries made using this new electrode type could have a higher capacity and be much safer than typical lithium metal-based batteries that use lithium foil as…

Electric cars rely on the same lithium-ion battery technology that’s in smartphones, laptops and virtually everything electronic. But the technology has been extremely slow to improve. While electric cars can more than handle the average American’s daily commute, the average gas-powered car can still go farther on a full tank of gas, charging stations are…

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a new, organic cathode material for lithium batteries. With sulfur at its core, the material is more energy-dense, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly than traditional cathode materials in lithium batteries. The research was published in Advanced Energy Materials on April 10, 2019. Optimizing…

Life today depends heavily on electricity. However, the unrelenting demand for electricity calls for increasingly greener and “portable” sources of energy. Although windmills and solar panels are promising alternatives, the fluctuation in output levels depending on external factors renders them as unreliable. Thus, from the viewpoint of resource allocation and economics, high-energy density secondary batteries…

By improving a water-in-salt battery prototype, researchers believe they are well on their way to developing new high energy batteries. A team from the University of Maryland (UMD) and the U.S. Army Research Lab (ARL) have created a new type of chemical transformation of the cathode that yields, for the first time ever, a reversible…

Soldiers carrying 15-25 pounds of batteries could carry batteries a fraction of the weight but with the same energy and improved safety, a new study shows. In the latest issue of the journal Nature, researchers at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, the Army’s corporate research laboratory known as ARL, and…

Various use of electronics and skin-attachable devices are expected with the development of transparent battery that can both generate and store power. DGIST announced on Tuesday, April 23 that Senior Researcher Changsoon Choi’s team in the Smart Textile Research Group developed film-type graphene based multifunctional transparent energy devices. Senior Researcher Changsoon Choi’s team actively used…

Scientists from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden believe a new type of battery with a catholyte that contains a graphene sponge could help bring lithium-sulphur batteries to the forefront, eventually replacing lithium-ion batteries. The researchers found that a porous, sponge-like aerogel made from reduced graphene oxide acts as a freestanding electrode in the…

Since 2012, Stefan Freunberger of the Institute for Chemistry and Technology of Materials at TU Graz has been working on development of a new generation of batteries with enhanced performance and longer useful lives, and which are also cheaper to produce than current models. He believes that lithium-oxygen batteries have significant potential. In 2017, in…

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have improved their recycling process that regenerates degraded cathodes from spent lithium-ion batteries. The new process is safer and uses less energy than their previous method in restoring cathodes to their original capacity and cycle performance. Zheng Chen, a professor of nanoengineering who is affiliated with the…

Inside modern cell phones are billions of nanoscale switches that flip on and off, allowing the phone to function. These switches, called transistors, are controlled by an electrical signal that is delivered via a single battery. This configuration of one battery to power multiple components works well for today’s technologies, but there is room for…

Every year, many are quick to upgrade when new versions of the latest smartphones, tablets or other electronic devices come out, but what happens to all the batteries from the older, discarded devices? A Rice University research team believes that a deep eutectic solvent may be the answer to the growing battery-recycling problem. The solvent…

Scientists have made a surprising discovery about how strange bacteria that live in soil and sediment can conduct electricity. The bacteria do so, the researchers determined, through a seamless biological structure never before seen in nature – a structure scientists can co-opt to miniaturize electronics, create powerful-yet-tiny batteries, build pacemakers without wires and develop a…

If manufacturers of cell-phone batteries could tell which cells will last at least two years, then they could sell only those to phone makers and send the rest to makers of less demanding devices. New research shows how manufacturers could do this. The technique could be used not only to sort manufactured cells but to…

While it has long been known that solid-state batteries are a safer and more energy dense alternative to the lithium-ion batteries commonly used for electric vehicles and personal electronics, challenges remain that prevent them from being implemented on a wider-scale. However, a research team from Cornell University has discovered that by starting with liquid electrolytes…

A team of scientists including researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have identified the causes of degradation in a cathode material for lithium-ion batteries, as well as possible remedies. Their findings, published on Mar. 7 in Advanced Functional Materials, could lead to the development of…