Today’s car batteries are massive, yet can only go about 100 miles, and can never come close to gasoline. But a new technology currently being developed under IBM’s “Battery 500 Project”, could result in a battery that would power cars for more than 500 miles on a single charge. They are developing a light-weight, ultra high-density lithium-air battery, or air-breathing battery, which actually breathes air.

In a lithium-air battery, oxygen will react with the soft element lithium to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy. When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released. Since the oxygen used for the reaction comes from the atmosphere, the battery will be much lighter compared to conventional batteries.

And these batteries have a much higher energy density than lithium-ion ones. Theoretically, the maximum energy density of lithium-air batteries is 12 kWh/kg. That’s around 15 times greater than li-ion, but more importantly comparable to gasoline. If the project is a success, lithium-air might not only replace li-ion, but also gasoline. That won’t happen anytime soon, but it’s certainly possible.

The talks about lithium-air battery actually started way back in 1970, but at the time we did not have the materials required to build one. But li-air is possible today as we have graphene and carbon nanotubes, and also IBM’s famous computer architecture, Blue Gene. IBM has received assistance from Asahi Kasei and Central Glass.

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With the IBM Battery 500 Project, they have brought together a team of scientific geniuses to boost battery storage density by a factor of 10 with lithium-air technology. Oh, and those IBM Supercomputers will help a bit too.

These batteries use nanoscale semiconductors which use the air around us to collect positive ions. The oxygen enters the battery on-demand which is unique compared to a sealed battery system. This nanoscale semiconductor fabrication technology will allow the surface area of the lithium-air battery electrodes to be increased by 100 times, allowing them to meet the goals of the project.

As shown in the photo, the comparison of a sealed lead-acid batteries to that of the lithium-air batteries is phenomenal. One lead acid is equivalent to 53 lithium-air batteries in weight! That is a alone will offer a huge performance boost to electric vehicles.

More on the Battery 500 Project in the video below.

Via Smarter Technology

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