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(The human body reacts in many, almost random ways to electrical current.)
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“Instead it breaks apart, in the same way we might when placed under stress,” Dr. Lithium-sulfur should be a holy grail in energy, especially for smartphones. Tesla Patents New Chemistry for Better Batteriesįor a long time, lithium-sulfur has had huge promise as a power source that far outpaces lithium-ion, but this simple structural problem has prevented development. This severs the connections that allow the battery to distribute their power at all. As lithium-sulfur batteries charge, the volume of the electrodes inside them grows so much that, like Alice in Alice in Wonderland, the electrode can bust out of its casing. In Science Advances, lead author Mahdokht Shaibani and colleagues in Australia and Europe describe a way to make lithium-sulfur batteries more powerful by building frameworks that can accommodate the sulfur electrodes’ rapidly changing volume without losing energy.ĭifferent kinds of distortion and swelling also affect lithium-ion batteries-electrodes power every kind of battery and their volumes can change dramatically because of chemistry and accumulating power. Scientists are exploring ways to make lithium-sulfur batteries that can compete with the lithium-ion batteries that are the current standard. High-capacity electrodes swell in volume up to 78 percent and bust out of traditional network binder architectures.Lithium-sulfur is a holy grail of battery development, with capacity many times more than lithium ion alone.Lithium-sulfur batteries could be a reality with a new binding filler arranged as a bridge, not a network.