Ultra-high-power lithium-ion battery 'charges in seconds'

London, Mar 12 (ANI): The days of waiting hours to charge a mobile phone could soon be history, thanks to US researchers, who have created a revolutionary battery that recharges in seconds instead of several hours.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that could usher in smaller, lighter batteries, reports Nature journal.

The work was led by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

Since the material involved is not new - the researchers have simply changed the way they make it.

State-of-the-art lithium rechargeable batteries have very high energy densities - they are good at storing large amounts of charge. The tradeoff is that they have relatively slow power rates - they are sluggish at gaining and discharging that energy.

Conventionally, boffins have thought that the lithium ions responsible, along with electrons, for carrying charge across the battery simply move too slowly through the material.

However, about five years ago, Ceder and colleagues made a surprising discovery. Computer calculations of a well-known battery material, lithium iron phosphate, predicted that the material's lithium ions should actually be moving extremely quickly.

Further calculations showed that lithium ions can indeed move very quickly into the material but only through tunnels accessed from the surface. If a lithium ion at the surface is directly in front of a tunnel entrance, there's no problem: it proceeds efficiently into the tunnel. But if the ion isn't directly in front, it is prevented from reaching the tunnel entrance because it cannot move to access that entrance.

Ceder and Byoungwoo Kang, a graduate student in materials science and engineering, devised a way around the problem by creating a new surface structure that does allow the lithium ions to move quickly around the outside of the material, much like a beltway around a city. When an ion traveling along this beltway reaches a tunnel, it is instantly diverted into it.

Using their new processing technique, the two went on to make a small battery that could be fully charged or discharged in 10 to 20 seconds.

Ceder notes that further tests showed that unlike other battery materials, the new material does not degrade as much when repeatedly charged and recharged. This could lead to smaller, lighter batteries, because less material is needed for the same result. (ANI)