A good battery needs two things: high energy density for powering devices and stability so it can be safely and reliably recharged thousands of times. Over the past thirty years, lithium-ion batteries have reigned supreme — proving their performance in smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles.
But battery researchers have begun to approach the limits of lithium-ion. As next-generation long-range vehicles and electric aircraft start to arrive on the market, the search for safer, cheaper, and more powerful battery systems that can outperform lithium-ion is ramping up., led by Matthew McDowell, associate professor in the George W.
The idea of making batteries with aluminum isn’t new. Researchers investigated its potential in the 1970s, but it didn’t work well. A solid-state battery built in Matthew McDowell’s laboratory at Georgia Tech. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology “We needed to incorporate a material that would address aluminum’s fundamental issues as a battery anode,” said Yuhgene Liu, a Ph.D. student in McDowell’s lab and first author on the paper. “Our new aluminum foil anode demonstrated markedly improved performance and stability when implemented in solid-state batteries, as opposed to conventional lithium-ion batteries.”
“One of the benefits of our aluminum anode that we’re excited about is that it enables performance improvements, but it also can be very cost-effective,” McDowell said. “On top of that, when using a foil directly as a battery component, we actually remove a lot of the manufacturing steps that would normally be required to produce a battery material.”
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