This Breakthrough Battery Will Literally Last Forever

Source: Medium, Will Lockett
Photo: Patrick on Unsplash

Zero-degradation eternal batteries are here.

Recently, I had to replace my phone because the battery died. I tell a lie — it puffed up, broke its internal electronics, and threatened to explode. That was a fun day at the office! However, this is not an uncommon occurrence, and I’m sure many of you readers have had similar experiences. What is concerning is the environmental impact of this short battery lifespan if we choose to implement our best planet-saving technology, such as EVs and renewable energy, given the risk of generating massive amounts of e-waste and ecosystem-destroying mining. Fortunately, researchers from the University of New South Wales and Yokohama National University recently published a paper claiming to have created a solid-state battery that will never die! So, could this be a solution to our battery lifespan issue?

Before we dive into this astonishing paper, let’s quickly recap what a solid-state battery is and how batteries degrade.

Most of our batteries use lithium-ion chemistry. These batteries contain two electrodes (positive and negative ends) as well as a gel-like electrolyte and a separator in the middle. The electrolyte enables ions (atoms that have lost an electron) of lithium to travel from electrode to electrode, which is the mechanism that allows a battery to store and release electrical energy. A solid-state battery is very similar, except it uses a solid ceramic or glass electrolyte. These denser electrolytes make solid-state batteries far more energy-dense and possibly faster-charging than regular lithium-ion batteries. As such, they are incredibly useful for long-range and fast-charging EVs, battery-powered aviation, and even battery-powered ships!

Okay, so that’s solid-state batteries. What about battery degradation? Well, those lithium ions sometimes find a rogue electron at the positive electrode, absorb it, and deposit themselves as raw lithium metal on the electrode. This removes the lithium from use, which depletes the amount of lithium-ions available in the battery and, in turn, reduces the battery’s overall capacity. These lithium deposits can also build up as a spike known as a dendrite, which grows towards the negative side of the battery. If it reaches that side, it will short-circuit the battery, resulting in the cell’s catastrophic failure.

These dendrites are why your iPhone’s battery life is terrible after a year or two of use, or why buying an old EV might not be such a great idea. But they are even worse for solid-state batteries, as the dendrites can grow into the solid electrolyte and crack it, like a root growing through concrete, which renders the cell useless. As such, many solid-state cells don’t have a long enough lifespan to be useful.

This is where this paper comes in. You see, these genius researchers have found a positive electrode material that works in a solid-state cell and is so incredibly stable that it carries no rogue electrons, which, in turn, means that a solid-state battery using this electrode will last forever! At least, that is what they claim.

To test this incredible electrode out, they built a small 300 mAh cell and bench-tested it. After 400 charge cycles, it still had the exact same capacity of 300 mAh, meaning it had literally no degradation at all! For some sense of scale, this is like driving a Tesla Model 3 LR 132,000 miles and seeing no drop in overall battery capacity. In contrast, the cells in Teslas typically degrade by around 12% after this distance.

To these researchers, this demonstrated that their battery would last for an essentially infinite number of charge cycles. Such a battery would revolutionise the world.

Imagine if EVs started using this battery. An EV would last for significantly longer before needing to be scrapped. It takes a lot of carbon emissions and environmentally horrendous mining to build EVs and the batteries within them, so giving them a longer life will make the EV industry far more eco-friendly than it is with its current battery technology. What’s more, the second-hand EV market is currently risky, as high-mileage EVs can be totally useless. But with this battery, cheap, second-hand, high-mileage EVs can still be a viable option, so that anyone, no matter the budget, can drive with zero emissions.

The same is true for grid-level batteries. These are key to the renewable energy infrastructure, but the cells within them only last around 20 years. Because they are a relatively new concept, this isn’t a problem yet, as no grid batteries are over 20 years old. But in a decade or so, these grid batteries will need to start replacing their batteries, and the production of these replacement batteries will cause even more carbon emissions and environmentally damaging mining to take place. However, with this battery, no such replacements need to happen, and as such, they will reduce the overall carbon emissions of renewable energy.

Moreover, by giving solid-state batteries a usable lifespan, they could make zero-emission shipping and aviation a reality. These applications have sky-high energy density demands, and current battery tech is far too bulky to meet them. But solid-state batteries do meet these requirements. If both the shipping and aviation industries could switch to battery power, it could save literally billions of kilogrammes of carbon emissions per year.

So, will these immortal batteries revolutionise the world? Possibly.

Further research is still needed to see if these electrodes really can last forever. 400 charge cycles on a single cell simply isn’t enough data to confirm this. There are other concerns, like how fast do these cells charge? How safe are they? How much will they cost? But, at the very least, it looks like these brilliant researchers have found a way to make incredibly long-lasting, energy-dense batteries. The knock-on effects of such a technology could have a profound impact on our efforts to save the world from ourselves.

https://medium.com/predict/this-breakthrough-battery-will-literally-last-forever