Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new lithium metal battery that can be charged and discharged at least 6,000 times — more than any other pouch battery cell — and can be recharged in a matter of minutes.
I would love to see more dramatic research into battery tech, but steps like this are also welcome, as these are necessary stepping stones before even better steps.
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Researchers at Harvard John A. Paulson SEAS have developed a new lithium metal battery that withstand at least 6,000 charging cycles and can be recharged in a matter of minutes.
“Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries because they have ten times the capacity of commercial graphite anodes and could drastically increase the driving distance of electric vehicles,” said Xin Li, Associate Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and senior author of the paper.
In 2021, Li and his team offered one way to deal with dendrites by designing a multilayer battery that sandwiched different materials of varying stabilities between the anode and cathode.
This multilayer, multi-material design prevented the penetration of lithium dendrites not by stopping them altogether, but rather by controlling and containing them.
In the new research, Li and his team stop dendrites from forming by using micron-sized silicon particles in the anode to constrict the lithiation reaction and facilitate homogeneous plating of a thick layer of lithium metal.
These coated particles create a homogenous surface across which the current density is evenly distributed, preventing the growth of dendrites.
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