Story at a glance
- A new type of battery could power devices like cell phones and electric cars longer than traditional lithium-ion batteries.
- The new battery is called a lithium-sulfur battery, a formulation scientists knew had great potential for energy storage, but which had substantial technical roadblocks preventing its widespread use.
- By redesigning the internal structure of the battery scientists were able to find a potential solution, creating a powerful battery that could help facilitate the world’s transition away from fossil fuels.
Researchers are developing a new battery that could allow smartphones to last five days on a single charge or power an electric car through a trip of more than 600 miles.
The new lithium-sulfur battery, as opposed to the lithium-ion batteries that power most high-tech electronics today, could help facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels towards electricity produced from renewable sources, New Atlas reports.
Researchers say they are close to commercializing the technology, which can, pound for pound, outperform existing batteries five times over. Lithium-sulfur batteries have long been recognized as having tremendous potential, owing to their higher energy density, but have also presented significant engineering challenges.
The gist of the trouble is that when lithium batteries charge up, chemical reactions and the growing electrical charge causes the electrodes inside the battery to expand. In lithium-ion batteries this expansion is manageable, but, in part because lithium-sulfur batteries store more energy, they expand even more — increasing their volume by up to 78 percent, roughly eight times that seen in lithium-ion batteries.
This expansion is so dramatic that it can cause the electrode to bust out of its casing. If the electrode explodes out of its casing, it severs the connections that allow the batteries to distribute their power.
The lithium-sulfur design attempts to get around this issue by changing the architecture inside the battery, building in more space to allow the electrodes to expand.
“Their overall structure moved from a network — when a liquid binder fills the space in a battery, it cradles the electrodes in a networked topology — to a bridge, where all the electrodes are linked but without packing the entire interior with liquid,” writes Caroline Delbert in Popular Mechanics.
“This approach not only favors high performance metrics and long cycle life, but is also simple and extremely low-cost to manufacture,” Matthew Hill, who helped develop the battery, told CNN. The manufacturing also relies primarily on water-based processes which could help reduce hazardous waste.
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