Researchers have increased the lifetime of a promising electric vehicle battery to a record level, an important step toward the goal of lighter, less expensive and long-lasting batteries for future electric vehicles. The work is reported June 28 in the journal Nature Energy.
Such batteries—the goal of research groups the world over—are seen as an important part of the solution to reduce the effects of climate change, and scientists are exploring a dizzying array of
One solution on the horizon is a lithium-metal battery for electric vehicles. These batteries hold almost twice the energy of their widely used lithium-ion counterparts, and they’re lighter. That combination offers the enticing prospect of an electric vehicle that would be lighter and go much farther on a single charge. But lithium-metal batteries in the laboratory have been plagued by premature death, lasting only a fraction of the time of today’s lithium-ion batteries.
Now, a team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has created a lithium-metal battery that lasts for 600 cycles, far longer than other reported results. That means it can be fully charged and discharged 600 times before it dies.
Source: Pnnl