Someone has just figured out how to make a battery that is more powerful than the currently popular lithium ion. The thing about it, however, is that it will not heat up and explode.
This is what Tufts University professor Mike Zimmerman is claiming in regards to his new ionic battery technology. Zimmerman, who is also the founder of Ionic Materials, has developed an ionic battery that makes use of lithium metal instead of lithium ion. The lithium metal stores twice as much power as the lithium ion making the battery more powerful.
Zimmerman also found a way to prevent the battery from doing a Galaxy Note 7. The problem with today's battery of choice - the lithium ion battery - is that it has the potential to be disastrous as evidenced by the debacle that is the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The said device suddenly went up in smoke and in some instances caught fire. Samsung has recently unveiled that the battery, particularly the fact that it had design flaws and manufacturing issues, was the cause of the explosions.
Consider first that a lithium ion battery naturally degrades with time so its performance gets poorer every time the device is charged. Also, the said battery has positive and negative electrodes called anode and cathode, respectively. These electrodes are separated by a thin sheet called a separator. The rest of the space is filled up with electrolyte which is a flammable liquid.
Because of the flaw in design of the affected batteries, the thin sheet that separated the negative and positive layers broke down. Without the protective separator, the anode and cathode interacted with each other directly resulting to the battery heating up and eventually exploding, thanks to the flammable liquid.
As Hot Hardware explains, Zimmerman's battery uses a plastic film instead of the flammable electrolyte. The plastic film does not overheat or catch fire easily and is not susceptible to damage from bending, piercing, cutting or any other method of physically damaging the battery.
