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bitshifter writes:

From MIT and KurzweilAI.net:

MIT and Samsung researchers have developed a new approach to achieving long life and a 20 to 30 percent improvement in power density (the amount of power stored in a given space) in rechargeable batteries — using a solid electrolyte, rather than the liquid used in today's most common rechargeables. The new materials could also greatly improve safety and last through "hundreds of thousands of cycles."

[...] The electrolyte in rechargeable batteries is typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery's two electrodes to the other during charging and discharging. That material has been responsible for the overheating and fires that, for example, resulted in a temporary grounding of all of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets. With a solid electrolyte, there's no safety problem, he says. "You could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it — there's nothing there to burn."

The key to making all this feasible, Ceder says, was finding solid materials that could conduct ions fast enough to be useful in a battery. The initial findings focused on a class of materials known as superionic lithium-ion conductors, which are compounds of lithium, germanium, phosphorus, and sulfur. But the principles derived from this research could lead to even more effective materials, the team says, and they could function below about minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Another "almost there" revolutionary battery technology?

Design principles for solid-state lithium superionic conductors [abstract]

Original Submission