Via NewAtlas.com: The most creative battery breakthroughs of 2021 By Nick Lavars
With lithium-ion batteries serving as the engine room for so much of the
modern world, from phones and laptops, to electric cars and planes,
every scientific breakthrough that improves their performance is an
important one. Some of these come from incremental advances that
experiment with alternative materials, for example, while some come from
re-imagining the whole device and the way they work from the ground up.
2021 produced a stellar crop of discoveries that resulted from
researchers thinking outside the box in this way. Let's take a look at
the most creative and interesting examples.
Opening up to faster charging
One of the ways scientists hope to improve the charging rates
of batteries is by using porous structures for the anode, one of its
two electrodes. This offers a greater contact area with the liquid
electrolyte that transports lithium ions and enables them to diffuse
more easily through the material, potentially making for batteries that
charge much, much faster.One of the ways scientists hope to improve the charging rates of
batteries is by using porous structures for the anode, one of its two
electrodes. This offers a greater contact area with the liquid
electrolyte that transports lithium ions and enables them to diffuse
more easily through the material, potentially making for batteries that
charge much, much faster.
In November, we looked at a promising new take
on this technology, with scientists at the University of Twente
fashioning an anode out of a material called nickel niobate. This
featured an "open and regular" crystal structure with identical,
repeating channels, making it ideal for ion transport.
This was
worked into a full battery cell, with the scientists finding it offered
ultra-fast charging rates, 10 times faster than today's lithium-ion
batteries. This was a marked improvement on the porous materials
proposed so far in this area, which feature disorganized and random
channels that cause the structures to cave in during charging and the
battery to fail. As a sweetener, the researchers point out that nickel
niobate has a higher volumetric density than the graphite used for
today's anodes, which could also lead to commercial batteries that are
lighter and more compact.
Bringing lithium back from the dead
