PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Solid-state batteries line up for better performance

Solid-state batteries line up for better performance
2021-05-20
(Press-News.org) CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Solid-state batteries pack a lot of energy into a small space, but their electrodes are not good at keeping in touch with their electrolytes. Liquid electrolytes reach every nook and cranny of an electrode to spark energy, but liquids take up space without storing energy and fail over time. Researchers are now putting solid electrolytes in touch with electrodes made of strategically arranged materials - at the atomic level - and the results are helping drive better solid-state battery technologies.

A new study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun, postdoctoral research associate Beniamin Zahiri, and Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. director of research and development John Cook, demonstrates how control over the atomic alignment of solid materials can improve the cathode-solid electrolyte interface and stability in solid-state batteries. The results are published in the journal Nature Materials.

"With batteries, it's not just materials that are important, but also how the atoms on the surfaces of those materials are arranged," Zahiri said. "Currently, solid-state battery electrodes contain materials with a large diversity of surface atom arrangements. This leads to a seemingly infinite number of electrode-solid electrolyte contact interface possibilities, all with different levels of chemical reactivity. We are interested in finding which arrangements lead to practical improvements in battery cycle life, energy density and power."

The researchers said an electrolyte's stability controls how many charging and discharging cycles a battery can handle before it starts to lose power. Because of this, scientists are in a race to find the most stable electrolyte materials.

"In the rush to find stable solid electrolyte materials, developers have sort of lost sight of the importance of what is happening in that very thin interface between electrolyte and electrode," Zahiri said. "But the stability of the electrolyte will not matter if the connection between it and the electrodes cannot be evaluated in an efficient way."

In the lab, the team built electrodes containing sodium and lithium ions with specific atomic arrangements. They found correlations between battery performance and interface atomic arrangement in both the lithium- and sodium-based solid-state batteries. They also discovered that minimizing the interface surface area and controlling the electrodes' atomic alignment is key to both understanding the nature of interface instabilities and improving cell performance.

"This is a new paradigm for how to evaluate all the important solid electrolytes available today," Cook said. "Before this, we were largely just guessing what electrode-solid electrolyte interface structures gave the best performance, but now we can test this and find the best combination of materials and atomic orientations."

As demonstrated by co-author mechanical science and engineering professor Elif Ertekin and her group, having this level of control gave the researchers the information needed to run atomic simulations that they hypothesize will lead to even better electrolyte materials in the future, the researchers said.

"We think this will teach us a lot about how to investigate emerging solid electronics," Braun said. "We are not trying to invent new solid electrolytes; the materials world is doing a great job with that already. Our methodology will allow others to precisely measure the interfacial properties of their new materials, something that has otherwise been very difficult to determine."

INFORMATION:

Braun is the Materials Research Laboratory director and an affiliate of mechanical science and engineering, chemistry, the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology and the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at Illinois. Ertekin is the director of mechanics programs in mechanical sciences and engineering and also is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory and National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The Department of Defense, the United States Army and the Army Corps of Engineers supported this study.

Editor's notes: To reach Paul Braun, call 217-244-7293; email pbraun@illinois.edu. The paper "Revealing the role of the cathode-electrolyte interface on solid-state batteries'" is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau. DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-01016-0.


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Solid-state batteries line up for better performance

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

UMD collaborates across disciplines to characterize the economics and value of pollination

UMD collaborates across disciplines to characterize the economics and value of pollination
2021-05-20
The University of Maryland (UMD) co-published a new review paper in the Annual Review of Resource Economics to examine pollinators from both an economic and ecological perspective, providing much needed insight into the complexities of valuing pollination. Pollinators are not only a critical component of a healthy ecosystem, but they are also necessary to produce certain foods and boost crop yields. While native and wild pollinators (whether they be certain bee species, other insects and animals, or just the wind) still play an important role, managed honey bee colonies are commercially trucked around the U.S. to meet the need for pollination services in agricultural products. Recent reports of ...

Science moves closer to diet that improves metabolic health without sharp cuts in calories

Science moves closer to diet that improves metabolic health without sharp cuts in calories
2021-05-20
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - A diet that improves the biomarkers of metabolic health, and that could potentially slow the aging process, has moved a step closer to reality. "We've known for years that restricting the amino acid methionine in the diet produces immediate and lasting improvements in nearly every biomarker of metabolic health," said Thomas W. Gettys, PhD, Professor and Director, Nutrient Sensing and Adipocyte Signaling Laboratory at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. "The problem is that methionine-restricted diets have been difficult to implement because they taste so bad." Until now. Restricting methionine normally involves diets formulated with elemental (e.g., individual) amino acids. Individual amino acids are the building blocks ...

Weight cycling linked to increased sleep problems in women

2021-05-20
May 20, 2021 - Women with a history of weight cycling - losing and regaining 10 pounds or more, even once - have increased rates of insomnia and other sleep problems, reports a study in The Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, official journal of the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "History of weight cycling was prospectively associated with several measures of poor sleep, including short sleep duration, worse sleep quality, greater insomnia, greater sleep disturbances, ...

Airborne radar reveals groundwater beneath glacier

Airborne radar reveals groundwater beneath glacier
2021-05-20
Melting glaciers and polar ice sheets are among the dominant sources of sea-level rise, yet until now, the water beneath them has remained hidden from airborne ice-penetrating radar. With the detection of groundwater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland, researchers have opened the possibility that water can be identified under other glaciers from the air at a continental scale and help improve sea-level rise projections. The presence of water beneath ice sheets is a critical component currently missing from glacial melt scenarios that may greatly impact how quickly seas rise - for example, by enabling big chunks of ice to calve ...

Forensic memory detection tests less effective in older adults

2021-05-20
New research led by the University of Kent's School of Psychology has found that some brain activity methods used to detect incriminating memories do not work accurately in older adults. Findings show that concealed information tests relying on electrical activity of the brain (electroencephalography [EEG]) are ineffective in older adults because of changes to recognition-related brain activity that occurs with aging. EEG-based forensic memory detection is based on the logic that guilty suspects will hold incriminating knowledge about crimes they have committed, and therefore their brains will elicit a recognition response ...

The entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1 sequenced

The entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1 sequenced
2021-05-20
For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today's Romania 35,000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa migration was not the great bottleneck in human development but rather this occurred during and after the most recent Ice Age. This is the finding of a new study led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University and being published in Current Biology. "She is a bit more like modern-day Europeans than the individuals in Europe 5,000 years earlier, but the difference is much less than we had thought. We can see that she is not a direct ancestor of modern Europeans, but she is a predecessor of the hunter-gathers that lived in Europe until the end of the last ...

Newly identified antibody can be targeted by HIV vaccines

2021-05-20
DURHAM, N.C. - A newly identified group of antibodies that binds to a coating of sugars on the outer shell of HIV is effective in neutralizing the virus and points to a novel vaccine approach that could also potentially be used against SARS-CoV-2 and fungal pathogens, researchers at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute report. In a study appearing online May 20 in the journal Cell, the researchers describe an immune cell found in both monkeys and humans that produces a unique type of anti-glycan antibody. This newly described antibody has the ability to attach ...

Survival of migrating juvenile salmon depends on stream flow thresholds

Survival of migrating juvenile salmon depends on stream flow thresholds
2021-05-20
Juvenile salmon migrating to the sea in the Sacramento River face a gauntlet of hazards in an environment drastically modified by humans, especially with respect to historical patterns of stream flow. Many studies have shown that survival rates of juvenile salmon improve as the amount of water flowing downstream increases, but "more is better" is not a useful guideline for agencies managing competing demands for the available water. Now fisheries scientists have identified key thresholds in the relationship between stream flow and salmon survival that can serve as actionable targets for managing water resources in the Sacramento River. The new analysis, published May 19 in Ecosphere, revealed nonlinear ...

Understanding light-activated proteins in order to improve them

Understanding light-activated proteins in order to improve them
2021-05-20
Today, proteins that can be controlled with light are a widely used tool in research to specifically switch certain functions on and off in living organisms. Channelrhodopsins are often used for the technique known as optogenetics: When exposed to light, these proteins open a pore in the cell membrane through which ions can flow in; this is how nerve cells can be activated. A team from the Centre for Protein Diagnostics (PRODI) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum has now used spectroscopy to discover a universal functional mechanism of channelrhodopsins that determines their efficiency as a channel and thus as an optogenetic tool. The researchers led by Professor Klaus ...

Opening up possibilities with open-top optofluidic device

Opening up possibilities with open-top optofluidic device
2021-05-20
Microfluidic technologies have seen great advances over the past few decades in addressing applications such as biochemical analysis, pharmaceutical development, and point-of-care diagnostics. Miniaturization of biochemical operations performed on lab-on-a-chip microfluidic platforms benefit from reduced sample, reagent, and waste volumes, as well as increased parallelization and automation. This allows for more cost-effective operations along with higher throughput and sensitivity for faster and more efficient sample analysis and detection. Optoelectrowetting (OEW) is a digital optofluidic technology that is based on the principles of light-controlled electrowetting and enables ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

International collaboration enabled participatory stock assessment on glass eel fisheries in West Java, Indonesia

Enhanced melanoma vaccine offers improved survival for men

Nearly one-third of patients with TBI have marginal or inadequate health literacy

Genetic causes of cerebral palsy uncovered through whole-genome sequencing

Modesty and boastfulness – perception depends on usual performance

Do sweeteners increase your appetite? New evidence from randomised controlled trial says no 

Women with obesity do not need to gain weight during pregnancy, new study suggests

Individuals with multiple sclerosis face substantially greater risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19, despite high rates of vaccination

Study shows obesity in childhood associated with a more than doubling of risk of developing multiple sclerosis in early adulthood

Rice Emerging Scholars Program receives $2.5M NSF grant to boost STEM education

Virtual rehabilitation provides benefits for stroke recovery

Generative AI develops potential new drugs for antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Biofuels could help island nations survive a global catastrophe, study suggests

NJIT research team discovering how fluids behave in nanopores with NSF grant

New study shows association of historical housing discrimination and shortfalls in colon cancer treatment

Social media use may help to empower plastic surgery patients

Q&A: How to train AI when you don't have enough data

Wayne State University researchers uncover potential treatment targets for Zika virus-related eye abnormalities

Discovering Van Gogh in the wild: scientists unveil a new gecko species

Small birds spice up the already diverse diet of spotted hyenas in Namibia

Imaging detects transient “hypoxic pockets” in the mouse brain

Dissolved organic matter could be used to track and improve the health of freshwaters

Indoor air quality standards in public buildings would boost health and economy, say international experts

Positive associations between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

New imaging method illuminates oxygen's journey in the brain

Researchers discover key gene for toxic alkaloid in barley

New approach to monitoring freshwater quality can identify sources of pollution, and predict their effects

Bidirectional link between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

Cell division quality control ‘stopwatch’ uncovered

Vaccine protects cattle from bovine tuberculosis, may eliminate disease

[Press-News.org] Solid-state batteries line up for better performance