Researchers quantified a strong, beneficial, and reversible (over hundreds of cycles) chemical reaction involving oxygen ions in the crystal lattice of battery electrode materials. The results open up new ways to explore how to pack more energy into batteries with electrodes made out of low-cost, common materials. Read more »
Hidden Flow of Lithium Ions Points Way to Better Batteries
Experiments revealed that lithium ions unexpectedly flow along the surfaces of electrode particles, boosting the growth of lithium “hot spots” that shorten battery life. The results correct decades’ worth of assumptions and will help improve battery design, potentially leading to a new generation of lithium-ion batteries. Read more »
New Manganese Materials Bolster Cathode Capacity
The most expensive component of a battery, the cathode, requires rare transition metals like cobalt. Previous attempts to replace cobalt with inexpensive and non-toxic manganese delivered insufficient performance. Now, researchers have optimized the composition of high-energy-density, high-capacity manganese-based cathodes. Read more »
New Clues to Oxygen’s Role in Higher-Capacity Batteries
As battery electrodes, layered transition-metal (TM) oxides demonstrate storage capacities far beyond what’s explained solely by TM redox activity. In this work, measurements of the lattice oxygen redox activity in two lithium-rich layered oxides showed strong oxygen redox when manganese was the TM, but not with ruthenium. Read more »
3D Localization of Nanoscale Battery Reactions
A new tool lets researchers pinpoint the locations of chemical reactions happening inside batteries in three dimensions at the nanoscale level. Combining ptychography, tomography, and spectroscopy, Nanosurveyor 1 is a multidimensional tool providing novel insight into the design of next-generation batteries and devices. Read more »
Rational Optimization of Organic Solar-Cell Materials
Researchers have established a new quantitative model that connects molecular interactions in organic solar-cell materials to device performance. The work suggests a way to quickly identify ideal material mixtures and processing methods, bypassing trial-and-error strategies and minimizing labor-intensive synthesis. Read more » 
Clarifying the Working Principle of a High-Capacity Battery Electrode
Operando x-ray absorption spectroscopy experiments revealed the electrochemical reaction mechanism of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) electrodes in lithium-ion battery cells. The work unambiguously clarifies that the MoS2 conversion reaction is not reversible and that the Li2S formed is converted to sulfur in the first charge process. Read more »
Monovalent Manganese for High-Performance Batteries
Scientists have detected a novel chemical state of the element manganese that was first proposed about 90 years ago. The discovery enables the design of a high-performance, low-cost battery that, according to its developers, outperforms Department of Energy goals on cost and cycle life for grid-scale energy storage. Read more »
Scientists Confirm Century-Old Speculation on the Chemistry of a High-Performance Battery
Scientists have discovered a novel chemical state of the element manganese. This chemical state, first proposed about 90 years ago, enables a high-performance, low-cost sodium-ion battery that could quickly and efficiently store and distribute energy produced by solar panels and wind turbines across the electrical grid. Read more »
Fuel from the Sun: Insight into Electrode Performance
The mechanisms limiting the performance of hematite electrodes—potentially key components in producing fuel from the sun—have been clarified in interface-specific studies under realistic operating conditions, bringing us a step closer to storing solar energy in chemical fuels. Read more »
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