SoylentNews

kef writes:

"Lithium-sulphur batteries has been a promising technology for the last 40 years, but researchers could not get them to survive past about 100 cycles. Now a chemical engineer thinks he's found an answer. From the article:

'Chemical engineer Elton Cairns suspected he had tamed a promising-but-wild battery chemistry early last year, when his coin-sized cells were still going strong even after a few months of continual draining and recharging. By July, his cells at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had cycled 1,500 times and had lost only half of their capacity, a performance roughly on a par with the best Li-ion batteries. His batteries are based on Lithium-sulphur (Li-S) technology, which uses extremely cheap materials and in theory can pack in five times more energy by weight than Li-ion (in practice, researchers suspect, it will probably be only twice as much).'"