Lithium-ion

This year served up a stellar crop of battery advances that resulted from researchers thinking outside the box, reimagining these devices and the way they function. Let's take a look at the most creative and interesting examples.

A team led by the Nobel-Prize-winning inventor of rechargeable lithium batteries has come up with a way to boost their capacity, developing a novel coating that protects against significant losses at the outset.

While electric vehicles are greener than their fuel-burning counterparts, their battery packs still aren't as recyclable as they could be. A new process could help, by more efficiently extracting reusable materials from old lithium-ion batteries.

By better understanding the intricacies of how lithium batteries operate, scientists can more easily identify opportunities to improve their performance, and scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a powerful new tool for the job.

Scientists have made a breakthrough that overcomes a technical issue that has held back highly promising lithium-metal battery architecture, which could pave the way for batteries with as much as 10 times the capacity of today's devices.

A technique is allowing researchers to measure endogenous lithium concentrations in the human brain for the very first time. Researchers found natural lithium levels in white matter were lower in suicidal subjects than healthy controls.

An MIT team has developed an electrolyte solution that can accommodate high-capacity lithium-metal battery chemistry, paving the way for electric cars and mobile devices that could last far longer on each charge.

By swapping out conventional materials for experimental ones scientists continue to make exciting advances in the performance of lithium batteries, and a team in Japan has just published research around a particularly promising one.

Owing to its abundance and low cost, lead is an alternative battery material with plenty of appeal, and scientists have just demonstrated how it can form the basis of a new anode that offers far greater storage capacity than graphite.

QuantumScape has announced stunning performance figures for what may be the first commercially viable solid-state lithium-metal battery. It's claimed to add as much as 80% to the range of an electric car, and charge from 0-80% in just 15 minutes.

A new breakthrough could boost the eco-credentials of an environmentally friendly form of lithium battery even further, by restoring it to its original condition once it is spent using just a fraction of the energy of current approaches.

We got it wrong, folks. The Superbattery from Skeleton Technologies is not a hybrid battery/ultracapacitor energy system, it's an entire new type of cell that sits somewhere in between the two. And it will make it into EVs – just not how we expected.