A ‘liquid battery’ advance

“We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels”

14-Jun-2024 - As California transitions rapidly to renewable fuels, it needs new technologies that can store power for the electric grid. Solar power drops at night and declines in winter. Wind power ebbs and flows. As a result, the state depends heavily on natural gas to smooth out highs and lows of renewable ...

A battery’s hopping ions remember where they’ve been

Seen in atomic detail, the seemingly smooth flow of ions through a battery’s electrolyte is surprisingly complicated

22-Feb-2024 - Solid-state batteries store and release charge by nudging ions back and forth between two electrodes. From our usual point of view, the ions flow through the battery’s solid electrolyte like a gentle stream. But when seen on an atomic scale, that smooth flow is an illusion: Individual ions hop ...

Resting boosts performance of lithium metal batteries

Bringing dead lithium back to life: a simple approach extends battery cycle life

13-Feb-2024 - Next-generation electric vehicles could run on lithium metal batteries that go 500 to 700 miles on a single charge, twice the range of conventional lithium-ion batteries in EVs today. But lithium metal technology has serious drawbacks: The battery rapidly loses its capacity to store energy after ...

AI deciphers atomic-scale images for better batteries

Researchers answered long-standing questions about an emerging type of rechargeable battery posing competition to lithium-ion chemistry

21-Feb-2022 - Today’s rechargeable batteries are a wonder, but far from perfect. Eventually, they all wear out, begetting expensive replacements and recycling. “But what if batteries were indestructible?” asks William Chueh, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University and ...

Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store six times more charge

Serendipitous discovery: "It took us about at least a year to really realize what was going on"

01-Sep-2021 - An international team of researchers led by Stanford University have developed rechargeable batteries that can store up to six times more charge than ones that are currently commercially available. The advance, detailed in a new paper published Aug. 25 in the journalNature, could accelerate the ...

First closeups of how a lithium-metal electrode ages

Scientists have documented a process that makes these next-gen batteries lose charge - and eventually some of their capacity for storing energy - even when a device is turned off

26-Mar-2021 - The same process that drains the battery of your cell phone even when it's turned off is even more of a problem for lithium-metal batteries, which are being developed for the next generation of smaller, lighter electronic devices, far-ranging electric vehicles and other uses. Now scientists at ...

Predicting the slow death of lithium-ion batteries

In electric cars, the new technology could improve driving range estimates and prolong battery life

17-Sep-2020 - Batteries fade as they age, slowly losing power and storage capacity. As in people, aging plays out differently from one battery to another, and it's next to impossible to measure or model all of the interacting mechanisms that contribute to decline. As a result, most of the systems used to ...

Machine learning could speed the arrival of ultra-fast-charging electric car

21-Feb-2020 - Battery performance can make or break the electric vehicle experience, from driving range to charging time to the lifetime of the car. Now, artificial intelligence has made dreams like recharging an EV in the time it takes to stop at a gas station a more likely reality, and could help improve ...

Researchers find new ways to make clean hydrogen and rechargable zinc batteries

21-Jun-2016 - A Stanford University research lab has developed new technologies to tackle two of the world's biggest energy challenges - clean fuel for transportation and grid-scale energy storage. The researchers described their findings in two studies published this month in the journals Science Advances and ...

New 'designer carbon' from Stanford boosts battery performance

03-Jun-2015 - Stanford University scientists have created a new carbon material that significantly boosts the performance of energy-storage technologies. Their results are featured in ACS Central Science."We have developed a 'designer carbon' that is both versatile and controllable," said Zhenan Bao, the ...