New Li-ion Battery Design Boosts Energy Capacity and Charge Rate 10-Fold
Charging Up Loimere via Flickr For years, battery designers have been looking for the next big thing in energy storage technology that could replace the lithium-ion batteries currently found in everything from laptops to smartphones to cars. It turns out they may have simply needed to rethink the existing li-ion battery. Northwestern University researchers have re-engineered a lithium-ion battery that can hold ten times the charge of current batteries on the market, and can charge ten times faster. The trick: a redesigned anode that addresses the two main issues holding li-ion batteries back--charge capacity and charge rate. Li-ion batteries work via a chemical reaction in which lithium ions are swapped between two ends of a battery (known as the anode and the cathode). As energy is burned by a device, ions travel from where they are stored in the anode through an electrolyte to the cathode. In the process, electrical charge...