A research team led by the University of California San Diego has discovered the root cause of why lithium metal batteries fail. The team found that bits of lithium metal deposits break off from the surface of the anode during discharging and are trapped as “dead” or inactive lithium that the battery can no longer… Read more »

As lithium-ion batteries proliferate, the question of what to do with them when they wear out is becoming a major environmental concern. Less than five percent of used batteries are recycled today. Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an energy-efficient recycling process that restores used cathodes from spent batteries and makes… Read more »

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new way to improve the performance of lithium-rich cathode materials by creating oxygen vacancies at the material’s surface. In “Gas-solid interfacial modification of oxygen activity in layered oxide cathodes for lithium-ion batteries,” published in Nature Communications, Minghao Zhang and colleagues explain the importance of oxygen atoms in… Read more »