Magnesium Batteries Will Be Safer, More Efficient, And Reliable Than Lithium Batteries.

Magnesium Batteries Will Be Safer, More Efficient, And Reliable Than Lithium Batteries.

As we all know, it is still early days for the promise of safer, energy-dense solid-state rechargeable batteries. However, a team of high esteem scientists at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research has just discovered a breakthrough of fast magnesium-ion solid-state conductor that will go a very long way towards making non-flammable batteries with more capacity than the ones we have today.

Presently, in current commercial batteries of today, a liquid electrolyte transports the charge back and forth between the available cathode and anode. In fact, this is part of what can make them explode, according to one post from Berkeley Laboratory, where the discovery was made. The team was working on a magnesium battery, which can hold more charge than lithium-ion batteries, but they were not able to find a workable liquid electrolyte. So "magnesium is such a new technology, it does not have any good liquid electrolytes," said the laboratory's senior scientist whom by name is called Gerbrand Ceder. "We thought, why not leapfrog and make a solid-state electrolyte?"

Finally, the researchers settled on magnesium scandium selenide spinel, which indeed has an ion mobility comparable to electrolytes found in the lithium-ion batteries of today. The team also included scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Argonne, who on the other hand provided computing resources and experimental confirmation of the new solid electrolyte's mobility, respectively.