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Solid-State Battery Breakthrough Hints at Batteries That Never Die, It's Game Over

Solid-state batteries are expected to bring a quantum leap in battery performance, enabling true electric mobility. Unfortunately, nobody could solve one of their most important problems: the short lifespan. An international team of scientists claims it has found a solution.
Solid-state battery breakthrough hints at batteries that never die 6 photos
Photo: MIT
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Solid-state battery (SSB) research has gained speed in the past year thanks to various advantages over regular Li-ion batteries widely used in today’s electric vehicles. Among them is higher safety, thanks to all-solid electrolytes and the fact that they can be charged much more quickly than liquid-electrolyte batteries. The downside is their limited durability, caused exactly by their solid nature.

More specifically, with charge and discharge, the battery’s electrodes expand and shrink, which leads to cracks that damage the interface between the electrodes and the solid electrolyte. This irreversibly changes the crystal chemistry of the electrodes as the lithium ions are inserted into and extracted from them during charge and discharge. The seamless integration between the electrodes and the solid electrolyte is crucial for battery performance, and compromising this interface leads to a loss of capacity. Unfortunately, this happens very fast, which is why SSBs are still not used today.

A team of scientists led by the Professor Naoaki Yabuuchi of Yokohama National University, Japan, investigated a new type of electrode material with unprecedented stability during charge and discharge in an SSB. The killer material they found is composed of optimized portions of lithium titanate and lithium vanadium dioxide. When ground down to nanometer-sized particles, the material offers high energy capacity thanks to its large quantity of lithium ions. These can be reversibly inserted and extracted during the charge/discharge process.

This special material stands out because it has nearly the same volume when fully charged and fully discharged. This results from a delicate balancing act as lithium ions exit and vanadium ions migrate from their original positions to fill the gaps. Thus, shrinkage and expansion are well balanced, retaining the dimensional stability of the electrode during cycling.

The team, which also comprises scientists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney and LIBTEC in Japan, tested the new material in an all-solid-state battery cell. The result was a remarkable 300 mAh/gram capacity with no degradation over 400 charge/discharge cycles. The team believes that, by further refining dimensionally-invariant electrode materials, it may be possible to manufacture EV-grade solid-state batteries that are cheap, safe, energy-dense, and, most importantly, last for a lifetime.

“This finding could drastically reduce battery costs,” said Yabuuchi. “The development of practical high-performance solid-state batteries can also lead to the development of advanced electric vehicles. In the future, for instance, it may be possible to fully charge an electric vehicle in as little as five minutes.”
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About the author: Cristian Agatie
Cristian Agatie profile photo

After his childhood dream of becoming a "tractor operator" didn't pan out, Cristian turned to journalism, first in print and later moving to online media. His top interests are electric vehicles and new energy solutions.
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