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Energy storage

Batteries take charge

Nature Nanotechnology volume 6, pages 262–263 (2011)Cite this article

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A nanostructured electrode can allow a lithium-ion battery to charge to 90% of maximum capacity in two minutes.

Power sources for modern mobile devices are expected to store large quantities of electrical charge in small spaces, and to deliver this charge rapidly. However, these two requirements cannot always be met by a single energy-storing device. Supercapacitors, which store charge at surfaces, provide high charge and discharge rates (leading to high power densities) but have lower energy densities than batteries. Batteries, which store charge through the bulk of an electrode, can store more energy (and charge) per mass, but they suffer from slow charge and discharge rates (in other words, low power densities). Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Huigang Zhang, Xindi Yu and Paul Braun from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) report that a battery with nanostructured electrodes can achieve high energy and power densities simultaneously1.

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Figure 1: Bicontinuous battery electrodes.

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  1. Andreas Stein is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA,

    Andreas Stein

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Correspondence to Andreas Stein.

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Stein, A. Batteries take charge. Nature Nanotech 6, 262–263 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2011.69

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