MIT Develops Lithium Battery That Recharges in Seconds

A newly re-engineered battery material developed by MIT engineers could soon pave the way to rapidly recharging battery powered devices in seconds instead of minutes or hours. Think about plugging your car into an electrical plug while you run into the gas station to get a drink and by the time you come out, your car is charged up and ready to go another 100 miles or more.

The MIT team was led by Gergrand Ceder of Materials Science and Engineering. Ceder believes that a production capable rapid charging battery could be in place within two or three years.

Lithium batteries today have the ability to hold long charges due to very high energy densities - the downside is they take a long time to recharge. Lithium batteries for electric and hybrid cars "have a lot of energy, so you can drive at 55 mph for a long time, but the power is low. You can't accelerate quickly," Ceder said. This is due to the slow discharging rate of the energy stored in batteries on the market today.

Lithium ions in batteries were once thought to be slow with moving charges across the material properties but Ceder's team later found that lithium iron phosphate should be able to move very quickly instead. "If transport of the lithium ions was so fast, something else had to be the problem," Ceder said.

This is when his team did some calculations and discovered that lithium icons can move extremely quickly through the material but only through "tunnels" accessed from the surface of the battery properties. "If a lithium ion at the surface is directly in front of a tunnel entrance, there's no problem: it proceeds efficiently into the tunnel. But if the ion isn't directly in front, it is prevented from reaching the tunnel entrance because it cannot move to access that entrance." MIT News states.

By using this process, Ceder and his team was able to develop a small battery that can be fully charged (or discharged) in under 20 seconds. In comparison, it takes 6 minutes to fully charge or discharge the same battery that does not include the same properties that Cender has developed. Furthermore, the new battery that Ceder developed requires less material to be made thus resulting in a smaller and lighter battery.