On paper, it doesn’t seem like Christopher Wolverton’s (a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University) super lithium-rich battery should work. For one, the novel battery uses iron, an inexpensive metal that has notoriously failed in batteries. And in another difficult feat, the battery leverages oxygen to help drive the chemical reaction, which researchers previously believed would cause the battery to become unstable.
But not only does the battery work, it does so incredibly well.
Teaming up with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, Wolverton’s group developed a rechargeable lithium-iron-oxide battery that can cycle more lithium ions than its common lithium-cobalt-oxide counterpart.
The result is a much higher capacity battery that could enable smartphones and battery-powered automobiles to last much longer.
“Our computational prediction of this battery reaction is very exciting, but without experimental confirmation, there would be a lot of skeptics. The fact that it actually works is remarkable,” said Wolverton.
Supported by the US Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Center program, the research was recently published in Nature Energy. Zhenpeng Yao, a PhD student in Wolverton’s laboratory, and Chun Zhan, a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne, served as the paper’s first authors. Wolverton and Yao led the computational development, and Argonne led the experimental component of the research.
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