Battery

This year offered a little something for everybody with an interest in battery development, bringing us devices that could charge electric vehicles in 10 minutes and others that suck CO2 out of the air. Here are the biggest breakthroughs of 2019.

The biggest battery in the world is set to soon grow even bigger. The Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, built by Tesla and managed by renewable energy company Neoen, will be expanded by an extra 50 percent early next year.

The latest promising advance in battery research comes from chemical engineers at Penn State University, who have built a new battery they say can fully charge an electric car in just 10 minutes by operating at extreme temperatures for short bursts.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for pulling carbon dioxide out of a chimney flue at a power plant or even just ambient air. The new device is a specialized battery that absorbs CO2 while charging, then releases it for industrial use.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for the invention and development of the lithium-ion battery.

An innovative new battery design makes use of an element we’re producing too much of in carbon dioxide, and boasts an unprecedented ability to recharge 500 times.

Scientists at Purdue University have come up with a new and improved battery design by first fashioning a key material into a net-like structure called a nanochain.

​​Two short years ago, Tesla pieced together the world’s largest battery. The company is continuing its moves in this space with a massive new battery dubbed the Megapack, of which it says enough units can be linked together to take energy storage into the giga-scale realm.​

One of the largest natural sources of renewable energy could be right under our feet – literally – with geothermal energy. Now researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Sanoh Industrial have developed a new type of battery cell that can directly convert heat energy into electricity.

A South Australia-based startup says it's built a thermal energy storage device with a lifetime of at least 20 years​ that can store six times more energy than lithium-ion batteries per volume, for 60-80 percent of the price.

Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid cathode for a lithium-sulfur battery that seems to boast better energy density than existing versions of both lithium-ion and lithium-sulfur batteries.

At Mobile World Congress this week, Energizer unveiled the P18K Pop, which is basically more battery than phone. Packing a ridiculous 18,000 mAh capacity, it apparently lasts weeks on a charge – but on the flip side, it brings new meaning to the old phrase “brick phone.”