Seawater is a complex cocktail of useful minerals, but it’s hard to separate the ones we need. Now a team of scientists from Australia and the US has developed a new water desalination technique that can not only make seawater fresh enough to drink, but recover lithium ions for use in batteries.
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Batteries are the engine room for so much of the modern world, so there are plenty of folks with an interest in pushing battery technology forward. 2017 brought a raft of exciting breakthroughs aimed at making them safer, longer-lasting and faster-charging. Here's the best of the bunch.
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Magnesium-ion batteries have potential if scientists can crack the problem of finding an efficient electrolyte. Now scientists have developed a solid-state material that appears to be one of the fastest conductors of magnesium-ions, which could lead to safer and more efficient batteries.
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Scientists from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) are reporting a breakthrough that could greatly boost the capacity of lithium-ion batteries, while enabling them to charge five times faster.
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Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of all kinds of devices, so there is quite a bit of interest in making them lighter, more compact and able to hold more energy. A new tin-aluminum alloy developed by engineers in Texas might deliver on all three aspects.
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As good as it is as an electrode material, lithium is relatively rare and expensive. In the search for a cheaper alternative, a Stanford team has developed a sodium-ion battery that would beat lithium-ion batteries in terms of cost per storage capacity.
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Researchers at Rice University have improved lithium metal batteries with the help of an unlikely ingredient. The team found that adding asphalt to the anode made for lithium metal batteries that charge faster and are less likely to short circuit and fail.
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Stainless steel mesh is often used as filters and screens but once the material gets coated in rust and weakened, it's usually just discarded. Now Chinese scientists have figured out a way to take that metal trash and turn into high-performing treasure as electrodes in potassium ion batteries.
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In the quest for a better lithium battery, one thing stands between scientists and a genuine breakthrough: dendrites. But if a new technology lives up to its potential, it could solve this problem and enable lithium-metal batteries that can hold three times the energy of lithium-ion ones.
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Ask a smartphone user how to improve them, and it's a safe bet that longer battery life would top the list. Batteries with silicon anodes could help boost that, and now a team has shown that these batteries can be environmentally friendly too, sourced from glass bottles headed for the scrap heap.
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