Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408
Lithium-oxygen batteries could store 10 times the energy of today's lithium-ion cells
Lithium-ion batteries power everything from our smartphones to our cars. But one of their most promising replacements is lithium-oxygen batteries, which in theory could store 10 times more power. The only problem: They fall apart after just a handful of charging cycles. Now, researchers have found that running them at high temperatures—along with a couple of other fixes—can push them to at least 150 cycles. Although they would be too hot to handle in phones, lithium-oxygen batteries the size of rail cars could one day underpin a green energy grid, storing excess wind and solar power and delivering it on demand.
"This is very encouraging," says Yang Shao-Horn, a chemical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. But she and others caution that the new batteries must prove themselves over many more cycles before they'll be considered for the mass market.
A high-energy-density lithium-oxygen battery based on a reversible four-electron conversion to lithium oxide (DOI: 10.1126/science.aas9343) (DX)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:59PM
There has been talk of zinc-air for personal electronics for a long long time... I think lithium ion beat them in the price/practicality arena.
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