John Goodenough may be 94-years old, but he shows no sign of slowing down. Now, the co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery has developed the first all-solid-state battery cells that could result in safer, longer-lasting batteries for everything from electric cars to grid energy storage.

“Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge and discharge and cycle life are critical for battery-driven cars to be more widely adopted,” Goodenough says in a statement. “We believe our discovery solves many of the problems that are inherent in today’s batteries.”

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From electric vehicles to grid storage for renewables, batteries are key components in many of tomorrow’s innovations. But current commercialized batteries face problems of price, efficiency, safety, and life-cycle. The television series, NOVA, is exploring many of those issues in the upcoming episode, “Search for the Super Battery.”

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Lithium-ion batteries supply billions of portable devices with energy. While current Li-ion battery designs may be sufficient for applications such as smartphones and tablets, the rise of electric vehicles and power storage systems demands new battery technology with new electrode materials and electrolytes.

ECS student member Michael Metzger is looking to address that issue by developing a new battery test cell that can investigate anionic and cationic reactions separately.

Along with Benjamin Strehle, Sophie Slochenbach, and ECS Fellow Hubert A. Gasteiger, Metzger and company published their new findings in the Journal of The Elechemical Society in two open access papers.

(READ: “Origin of H₂ Evolution in LIBs: H₂O Reduction vs. Electrolyte Oxidation” and “Hydrolysis of Ethylene Carbonate with Water and Hydroxide under Battery Operating Conditions“)

“Manufacturers of rechargeable batteries are building on the proven lithium-ion technology, which has been deployed in mobile devices like laptops and cell phones for many years,” says Metzger, the 2016 recipient of ECS’s Herbert H. Uhlig Summer Fellowship. “However, the challenge of adapting this technology to the demands of electromobility and stationary electric power storage is not trivial.”

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One pair of ZPower hearing aid batteries can keep more than 200 disposable batteries out of the landfill.
Image: ZPower

Lithium based technologies have been dominant in the battery arena since Sony commercialized the first Li-ion battery in 1991. ECS member Jeff Ortega, however, believes that a different material holds more promise than its lithium competitor in the world of microbattery technology.

During the 229th ECS Meeting, Ortega presented work that focused on the analysis of data from commercially available rechargeable Li-ion and Li-polymer cells. He then compared the silver-zinc button cells of ZPower, where he currently serves as the company’s director of research. His results showed that the company’s silver-zinc button cells offer both greater capacity and greater density than their Li-ion and Li-polymer counterparts. Additionally, Ortega stated that the cells are also generally safer and better for the environment.

According to Ortega, the small silver-zinc cells have 57 percent greater energy density than both types of lithium based calls. Their potential applications including medical devices, body worn sensors, wearables, and any other microbattery application that demands long wear time. Currently, ZPower has implement these cells in hearing aid technologies.

“The ZPower Rechargeable System for Hearing Aids makes it easy to convert many new and existing hearing aids to rechargeable technology,” says Ortega in a statement. “The Rechargeable System offers a full day of power, charges overnight in the hearing aids, takes the place of an estimated 200 disposable batteries and lasts a full year. The ZPower hearing aid battery is replaced once per year by a hearing care professional, so the patient never has to touch a hearing aid battery again.”

Image: James Almond/Flickr

New research from the University of Washington is opening another avenue in the quest for better batteries and fuel cells. But this research is not a breakthrough in efficiency or longevity, rather a tool to more closely analyze how batteries work.

While we’ve come a long way from the voltaic pile of the 1800s, there is still much work to be done in the field of energy storage to meet modern day needs. In a society that is looking for ways to power electric vehicles and implement large scale grid energy storage for renewables, batteries and fuel cells have never been more important.

A research team from the University of Washington – including ECS members Stuart B. Adler and Timothy C. Geary – believes that these improvements will likely have to happen at the nanoscale. But in order to improve batteries and fuel cells at that microscopic level, we must first understand and see how they function.

The newly developed probe offers a window for researchers to understand how batteries and fuel cells really work.

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Image: Heinz Traimer/Wikimedia Commons

We may understand melanin best as the pigment that dictates our skin tone, but these pigments are actually super plentiful – existing in almost every organism on earth. While melanin is all around us, there is still much to learn about its chemical structure.

A group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University set out to better understand melanin, and in doing so, found that its chemical structure may be conducive to creating certain kinds of batteries.

“Functionally, different types of melanin molecules have quite different chemistries, so putting them together is a little like solving a jigsaw puzzle, with each molecule a puzzle piece,” says Venkat Viswanathan, ECS member and co-author of the study. “You could take any number of these pieces and mix and match them, even stack them on top of each other. So what we researched was, which of these arrangements is really correct?”

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While you may be unfamiliar with Khalil Amine, he has made an immense impact in your life if you happen to use batteries in any way.

As a researcher with a vision of where the science can be applied in the market, Amine has been monumental in developing and moving some of the biggest breakthroughs in battery technology from the lab to the marketplace.

Amine is currently head of the Technology Development Group in the Battery Technology Department at Argonne National Laboratory. From 1998-2008 he was the most cited scientist in the world in the field of battery technology.

He is the chair of the organizing committee for the 18th International Meeting on Lithium Batteries being held this June in Chicago.

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While we may have a good understanding of battery application and potential, we still lack a great deal of knowledge about what is actually happening inside a battery cell during cycles. In an effort to build a better battery, ECS members from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have made a novel development to improve battery performance testing.

Future of energy

The team’s work focuses on the design and placement of the reference electrode (RE), which measure voltage of the individual electrodes making up a battery cell, to enhance the quality of information collected from lithium-ion battery cells during cycles. By improving our knowledge of what’s happening inside the battery, researchers will more easily be able to develop longer-lasting batteries.

“Such information is critical, especially when developing batteries for larger-scale applications, such as electric vehicles, that have far greater energy density and longevity requirements than typical batteries in cell phones and laptop computers,” said Daniel Abraham, ECS member and co-author of the newly published study in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. “This kind of detailed information provides insight into a battery cell’s health; it’s the type of information that researchers need to evaluate battery materials at all stages of their development.”

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The 5-µm-diameter graphene balls in these scanning electron microscope images contain graphene nanosheets radiating outward from the center.
Credit: Chem. Mater.

Materials scientists have developed a new technique that could provide a simpler and more effective way to produce electrode materials for batteries and supercapacitors, which could potentially lead to devices with improved energy and power densities.

The researchers have unlocked this new battery technology by exposing tiny bits of graphene to a process that is very similar to deep-frying.

Prior to this development, scientists had difficulty using graphene in electrodes due to the difficulty encountered when processing the material. However, the researchers out of Yonsei University have learned how to harness the material’s electrical and mechanical properties while retaining its high surface are by using an alternative technique.

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