When It Comes to Battery Performance, Sodium May Just Be the New Lithium

Watch out lithium-ion batteries ! There is new material in town, and it may just make sodium-ion batteries more efficient than lithium-ion ones, particularly in speed of charge. The new material was discovered and demonstrated by researchers at the Nagoya Institute of Technology (NITech) in Japan. Competing with lithium-ion Lithium-ion batteries are near ubiquitous and with good reason. They are highly efficient. However, lithium is a very limited and costly resource and has sometimes even been labeled as the reason electric car adoption has not happened faster. Chemistry Sodium-ion could soon become an alternative that will be both cheaper and more accessible. Not only is sodium abundant on Earth but sodium-based components have an ideal crystal structure design that could yield much faster charging times. There is one complication, however. Sodium is a larger size than lithium and has different chemistry. This makes it impossible to simple swap lithium with sodium. Researchers have been on the hunt for a solution to this problem, and this new team may just have found it. But it was no easy feat. Scientists at NITech extracted about 4300 compounds from a crystal structure database and proceeded to conduct a high-throughput computation. Only one […]

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