The electrolyte, which carries charge back and forth between the battery's cathode and anode, is a liquid in all commercial batteries, which makes them potentially flammable, especially in lithium-ion batteries. A solid-state conductor, which has the potential to become an electrolyte, would be far more fire-resistant.
Researchers at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Argonne National Laboratory were working on a magnesium battery, which offers higher energy density than lithium, but were stymied by the dearth of good options for a liquid electrolyte, most of which tend to be corrosive against other parts of the battery. "Magnesium is such a new technology, it doesn't have any good liquid electrolytes," said Gerbrand Ceder, a Berkeley Lab Senior Faculty Scientist. "We thought, why not leapfrog and make a solid-state electrolyte?"
The material they came up with, magnesium scandium selenide spinel, has magnesium mobility comparable to solid-state electrolytes for lithium batteries. Their findings were reported in Nature Communications in a paper titled, "High magnesium mobility in ternary spinel chalcogenides." JCESR, a DOE Innovation Hub, sponsored the study, and the lead authors are Pieremanuele Canepa and Shou-Hang Bo, postdoctoral fellows at Berkeley Lab.
To read more, click here.