NEW ELECTROLYTEAnother key part of the battery work is the...

NEW ELECTROLYTE

Another key part of the battery work is the development of a new electrolyte. A fourth faculty member on the MIT team recently succeeded in doing just that (the work was not reported in the Nature article).

Enter Anne M. Mayes, the Class of '48 Associate Professor of Polymer Physics in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Professor Mayes's new electrolyte, a polymer, has a variety of novel properties. For one, it's a solid. Conventional electrolytes are liquid, which limits the shape of the battery (you need some kind of vessel to hold the liquid).

But the new electrolyte conceived by Professor Mayes is flexible. A battery made of it "would be something with the consistency of a potato-chip bag," Professor Sadoway said. "You could fold it up to make any number of different configurations." For example, imagine a car powered by a battery that's incorporated into the body panels.

The researchers recently created a battery with the new electrolyte, the new cathode and a conventional anode. This realizes the MIT team's first solid-state lithium battery, or one made completely of solids. And that brings the researchers closer to their ultimate goal.

"The American marketplace will not be interested in an electric car that can't go at least 200 miles before recharging," Professor Sadoway said. "In my judgment, the only technology that has a prayer of propelling a car that far is the solid-state lithium battery. That's based on theoretical studies and on our knowledge of materials' energy densities."

https://news.mit.edu/1998/battery-0429


Anne Marie Mayes (August 30, 1964 – January 25, 2011) was an American material science and engineer and a Toyota professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and MacVicar faculty fellow until 2006.^[1] She was the first woman to be promoted from assistant professor to tenured professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.^[1] Mayes focused her research on lithium polymer batteries and the role of polymers in environmental issues.^[1] The Anne M. Mayes '86 Fellowship for graduate students at MIT is named in her honor.^[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_M._Mayes