Cell phone batteries often heat up, and at times can even burst into flames. In most cases, the culprit behind such incidents can be traced back to lithium batteries. Despite providing long-lasting electric currents that can keep devices powered up, lithium batteries can internally short circuit, heating up the device.

Researchers at Texas A&M University have invented a technology that can prevent lithium batteries from heating and failing. Their carbon nanotube design for the battery’s conductive plate, called the anode, enables the safe storage of a large quantity of lithium ions, thereby reducing the risk of fire. The researchers said that their new anode architecture will help lithium batteries charge faster than current ­­commercially available batteries.

“We have designed the next generation of anodes for lithium batteries that are efficient at producing large and sustained currents needed to quickly charge devices,” said Juran Noh, a material sciences graduate student in Choongho Yu’s laboratory in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Also, this new architecture prevents lithium from accumulating outside the anode, which over time can cause unintended contact between the contents of the battery’s two compartments, which is one of the major causes of device explosions.”

Their results are published in the March issue of the journal Nano Letters.

In the pursuit of a rechargeable battery that can power electric vehicles (EVs) for hundreds of miles on a single charge, scientists have endeavored to replace the graphite anodes currently used in EV batteries with lithium metal anodes.

But while lithium metal extends an EV’s driving range by 30–50%, it also shortens the battery’s useful life due to lithium dendrites, tiny treelike defects that form on the lithium anode over the course of many charge and discharge cycles. What’s worse, dendrites short-circuit the cells in the battery if they make contact with the cathode.

For decades, researchers assumed that hard, solid electrolytes, such as those made from ceramics, would work best to prevent dendrites from working their way through the cell. But the problem with that approach, many found, is that it didn’t stop dendrites from forming or “nucleating” in the first place, like tiny cracks in a car windshield that eventually spread.

Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, have reported in the journal Nature Materials a new class of soft, solid electrolytes – made from both polymers and ceramics – that suppress dendrites in that early nucleation stage, before they can propagate and cause the battery to fail...

Full story: https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2020/07/20/battery-electric-planes-cars/

Estonia's Skeleton Technologies and Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have partnered up to complete development on what they're calling the SuperBattery for EVs – "a groundbreaking graphene battery with a 15-second charging time."

So what is it? Well, it appears it's a hybrid pack combining regular lithium-ion cells and Skeleton's own ultracapacitor cells, which feature a curved graphene construction, working in tandem, each part playing to its strengths...

Full story:https://newatlas.com/energy/skeleton-kit-superbattery-graphene-ultracpacitor/