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Developers at Caltech, NASA and Honda have teamed up to develop a new battery that can store ten times the power of current lithium-ion batteries.
There is hardly anyone in life who doesn’t depend on batteries in some way. Whether it’s on their vehicles, smartphones or life-saving devices – almost everyone has the need for a battery in some manner.
But the problem, of course, is batteries only hold so much “juice.” The amount of charge they hold only gets you so far. And let’s not forget, disposing of batteries also has a significant environmental footprint.
Last Friday, a new paper was published in the journal Science, announcing that a “dream team” of researchers from Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Honda that have been working in concert to develop a new type of battery that holds enormous promise for delivering tenfold the amount of energy compared to current battery types.
While cobalt and lithium-ion batteries are in widespread use, they do have their drawbacks, such as power storage and overheating. This new fluoride battery type potentially could deliver 10 times the amount of energy density currently offered by a conventional lithium-ion cell, while operating cooler, with a decreased risk of fire.
Even better, these new fluoride-based batteries require fewer resources to manufacture.
Fluoride batteries are nothing new. But the problem was, to get them to function properly, they required oven-like temperatures of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Battery overheating and fires have already been problematic in numerous electronic devices with current battery types. However, the researchers say that the new fluoride battery they have created is unlikely to burst into flames.
The best part is… Thanks to a new breakthrough achieved by the dream team of researchers, they have now accomplished the development of a fluoride-based battery (FIB) that can produce power at room temperature.
“Fluoride-ion batteries offer a promising new battery chemistry with up to ten times more energy density than currently available Lithium batteries,” said Christopher Brooks, who is co-author of the new report and a Honda Research Institute researcher, in a statement.
“Unlike Li-ion batteries, FIBs do not pose a safety risk due to overheating, and obtaining the source materials for FIBs creates considerably less environmental impact than the extraction process for lithium and cobalt.”
