Hi @Scarpa this is from Today" $tockhead very interesting !?!
Forget sodium-tastic lithium killers dreamt up by AI-fulled think tanks (or at least just shift them to one side for the moment), because another new technological breakthrough (in the research stage) has come to our attention.
And the good news for lithheads is – it uses a shedload of lithium and has the potential to revolutionise EV batteries.
‘Li’ leads new lithium battery research… (can’t make this up)
Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have reportedly developed a new lithium metal battery that blows away charging times and capacity of current options on the market.
The new tech is a solid-state battery design that can apparently be charged and discharged at least 6,000 times and can be recharged in a matter of minutes.
And get this, no other report we’ve read on this seems to think this is a coincidence or somehow portentous, but the senior researcher and author of the Harvard department’s paper published on Nature Materials is called ‘Li’.
Xin Li, to be exact, who works for a Harvard spinoff called Adden Energy.
In a media statement this week, Li noted:
“Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries because they have 10 times the capacity of commercial graphite anodes and could drastically increase the driving distance of electric vehicles.”
Li and Harvard/Adden believe the new battery design could help make EVs more affordable, noting:
“Our research is an important step toward more practical solid-state batteries for industrial and commercial applications.”
Research looks… solid. And tasty, like chocolate
The scientists aren’t the only ones working on solid-state battery tech, of course, but they believe their tackling of a particular problem – dentrites – makes their research particularly… solid.
According to Li and the Harvard team’s research paper, one of the biggest challenges with current lithium-ion anode batteries is the formation of dendrites on the surface of the anode.
These are small fern-like growths that spread into the electrolyte, running interference between anode and cathode, and a primary reason for the shorting out of batteries and even causing them to catch fire.
Per the research, the team’s battery “sandwiches different materials of varying stabilities between the anode and cathode. This multilayer, multi-material design prevented the penetration of lithium dendrites not by stopping them altogether, but rather by controlling and containing them.”
Added Li:
“In our design, lithium metal gets wrapped around the silicon particle, like a hard chocolate shell around a hazelnut core in a chocolate truffle.”
Mmm… sounds delicious.
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