Bright X-Rays, AI, and Robotic Labs—A Roadmap for Better Batteries

Batteries have come a long way. What used to power flashlights and toys, Timex watches and Sony Walkmans, are now found in everything from phones and laptops to cars and planes. 

Batteries all work the same: Chemical energy is converted to electrical energy by creating a flow of electrons from one material to another; that flow generates an electrical current. 

Yet batteries are also wildly different, both because the light bulb in a flashlight and the engine in a Tesla have different needs, and because battery technology keeps improving as researchers fiddle with every part of the system: the two chemistries that make up the anode and the cathode, and the electrolyte and how the ions pass through it from one to the other. 

A Chinese proverb says, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The Christian Bible says, “follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”

In other words, a more engineering-oriented proverb would say, “let’s create a lab and develop techniques for measuring the efficacy of different fishing rods, which will help us develop different rods for different bodies of water and different species of fish.”

The Argonne National Laboratory is one such lab. There, under the leadership of Venkat Srinivasan, director of its Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science, a team of scientists has developed a quiver of techniques for precisely measuring the velocity and behavior of ions and comparing it to mathematical models of battery designs. 

Venkat Srinivasan [Ven-kat Sri-ni-va-san] is also deputy director of Argonne’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a national program that looks beyond the current generation of lithium–ion batteries. He was previously a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wrote a popular blog, “This Week in Batteries,” and is my guest today. 

A @RadioSpectrum1 conversation with Venkat Srinivasan of @Argonne Available on Spotify and @IEEESpectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/multimedia/podcasts