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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

A Stanford undergraduate has contributed to a discovery that confounds the conventional wisdom in lithium-ion battery design [phys.org], pointing the way toward storage devices with more power, greater capacity, and faster charge and discharge capabilities.

The undergraduate was part of a 10-person research team led by William Chueh, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering. In an article published in the journal Advanced Materials, the team explained how a material previously considered secondary in importance was actually critical to overall battery performance, and also devised new design rules for better batteries.

Graduate student Yiyang Li and undergraduate Sophie Meyer led the collaborative effort to design experiments that disproved an assumption shared by battery designers for more than 20 years: While lithium-ion batteries needed a substance called carbon black in order to function, the precise amount of that material had not been considered crucial to overall performance.

"Our research demonstrated that isn't true," said Meyer, who started the experiments when she was a sophomore with no prior experience in materials science.
...
Li said that by upping the percentage of carbon black – as high as 20 percent in some experiments – they found that the cathode particles charged more quickly because they had more uniform carbon connectivity.

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