Lithium Related News, page-539

Lots of work being done to produce a solid state battery. His comment about the scarcity of lithium is pleasing.

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2018/11/29/john-goodenough

John Goodenough
The man who helped invent the lithium-ion battery is still trying to reinvent it.

I want to solve the car problem. I’d like to get all the gas [petrol] emissions off the highways of the world. I’m hoping to see it before I die. I’m 96 years old. There’s still time.” Delivered with an infectious chuckle, these words sum up what makes John Goodenough of the University of Texas a living legend in the world of batteries.

Almost 40 years after his pioneering electrochemistry helped usher in the era of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery, he is still trying to tame his troublesome brainchild. Today’s mobile phones and electric vehicles contain the same core battery components as when Sony first introduced them in 1991: a liquid electrolyte, a lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode (the positive side of the battery), developed by Dr Goodenough, and a carbon anode (the negative side of the battery), pioneered by Akira Yoshino in Japan.

But as Dr Goodenough has been pointing out for years, serious drawbacks persist. The electrolyte is flammable. If the battery is charged too fast, the anode grows dendrites (“metal whiskers” that can pass through the liquid electrolyte, either shortening the life of the battery or short-circuiting it and causing it to catch fire. Dealing with these shortcomings and making stacks of battery cells light, powerful and affordable enough to propel a car is his life’s mission.

In the past few years he and his colleagues have claimed a breakthrough. They have developed a solid-state battery using a lithium-glass electrolyte with a conductivity similar to a liquid electrolyte, and a lithium or sodium metal anode that does not produce dendrites, making it safer and easier to charge quickly. It does not use cobalt, which is increasingly hard to obtain, it can be charged and discharged up to 23,000 times, rather than just a few thousand cycles.

Dr Goodenough is particularly keen on a sodium anode because, as he puts it, it is available to anyone with access to an ocean, whereas lithium may one day, like oil, require what he calls “gunboat diplomacy” to secure supplies. The cathode remains a work in progress. Some scientists are sceptical of the team’s claim that the more often their new battery was cycled, the more its capacity to store electricity increased. But Dr Goodenough dismisses such criticism as competitive rivalry. He is not alone in expecting solid-state batteries to become commercially successful within the next 5-10 years. Japanese carmakers and Panasonic (which also produces lithium-ion cells for Tesla) have formed a partnership to develop them.

Dr Goodenough’s technology has not yet been licensed by a battery manufacturer, and he is the first to concede that battery breakthroughs have been exaggerated in the past. “When everybody’s blowing trumpets, be careful,” he says.