The new battery, with solid-state electrolyte, boosts power, lifespan and safety
High-tech devices and batteries go hand-in-hand. The battery in your phone or laptop can be a regular source of frustration, dying just before your flight or 10 minutes ahead of a video conference with clients.
But researchers with Samsung and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rethought the paradigm of batteries based on liquid electrolytes, and in the process developed a technology that lead researcher Gerbrand Ceder said could be “a real game-changer.”
Yan Wang, an MIT postdoc, and Ceder, visiting professor of materials science and engineering, developed the new battery in cooperation with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
Most batteries use liquid electrolytes to transport charged particles between the battery electrodes; this research group essentially found an alternative that exists in a solid state.
Ceder said these batteries could last through “hundreds of thousands of cycles. With a solid-state electrolyte, there’s virtually no degradation reactions left. There was a view that solids cannot conduct fast enough. That paradigm has been overthrown.”
He specifically called out the safety risks associated with liquid electrolyte batteries, name-checking manufacturers Boeing and Tesla. Ceder explained that liquid electrolyte batteries used in Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets had problems with overheating, causing the entire fleet to be temporarily grounded.
To that point, “All of the fires you’ve seen, with Boeing, Tesla and others, they are all electrolyte fires. The lithium itself is not flammable in the state it’s in in these batteries. [With a solid electrolyte] there’s no safety problem — you could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it — there’s nothing there to burn.”
Ceder said the result of the solid-state batteries yields “almost a perfect battery, solving most of the remaining issues.”
Other researchers were MIT grad student William Richards and postdoc Jae Chul Kim; Shyue Ping Ong of the University of California at San Diego; Yifei Mo at the University of Maryland; and Lincoln Miara at Samsung.
