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ENERGY MATERIALS

Topology to improve battery technology

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 181–182 (2022)Cite this article

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Both lithium- and sodium-ion batteries could play an important role in combating climate change, but they often suffer structural instabilities in the cathodes, which degrade performance. Now a study on two cathode materials that function in either battery type sheds light on how their structure should be designed to suppress these instabilities.

The growing global demand for lower emissions to help address climate change is setting unprecedented criteria for a number of advanced technologies. In the context of batteries, two important green applications, electric vehicles (EVs) and grid storage, are pushing the limits of modern batteries in terms of both energy density (to increase the driving range of EVs) and battery cycling (to lengthen the lifespan). Typically, when a battery material is engineered to maximize the amount of energy it can store, the long-term performance suffers. It has become necessary to design advanced materials that can both store large quantities of energy and maintain their structural stability during battery operation to enable good performance for years and soon, we hope, multiple decades.

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Fig. 1: The impact of structural transformation in cathodes on battery performance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Eric McCalla & Shipeng Jia

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  1. Eric McCalla
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  2. Shipeng Jia
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Correspondence to Eric McCalla.

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McCalla, E., Jia, S. Topology to improve battery technology. Nat Sustain 5, 181–182 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00822-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00822-3

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