SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
AI Comes Up With Battery Design That Uses 70 Per Cent Less Lithium
--- --- --- --- Entire Story Below - Must Be Edited --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [newscientist.com]:
Artificial intelligence can accelerate the process of finding and testing new materials, and now researchers have used that ability to develop a battery that is less dependent on the costly mineral lithium.
Lithium-ion batteries power many devices that we use every day as well as electric vehicles. They would also be a necessary part of a green electric grid, as batteries are required to store renewable energy from wind turbines and solar panels. But lithium is expensive [newscientist.com] and mining it damages the environment [newscientist.com]. Finding a replacement for this crucial metal could be costly and time-consuming, requiring researchers to develop and test millions of candidates over the course of years. Using AI, Nathan Baker [linkedin.com] at Microsoft and his colleagues accomplished the task in months. They designed and built a battery that uses up to 70 per cent less lithium than some competing designs.
The researchers focused on a type of battery that only contains solid parts [newscientist.com], and they looked for new materials for the battery component that electric charges move through, called the electrolyte. They started with 23.6 million candidate materials [newscientist.com] designed by tweaking the structure of established electrolytes and swapping out some lithium atoms for other elements. An AI algorithm then eliminated the materials that it calculated would be unstable, as well as those in which the chemical reactions that make batteries work would be weak. The researchers also considered how each material would behave while the battery was actively working. After only a few days, their list contained just a few hundred candidates, some of which had never been studied before.
“But we’re not material scientists,” says Baker. “So I called up some experts who’ve worked on large battery projects with the Department of Energy… and said, ‘What do you think? Are we crazy?’”
His team built a working battery with this material, albeit with a lower conductivity than similar prototypes that use more lithium. Baker and Murugesan both say that lots of work is left to optimise the new battery. However, the process of making it – from the first time Murugesan spoke to the Microsoft team to the battery being functional enough to turn on a light bulb – took about nine months.
