Lithium ion batteries move the world and, in the era of electrification, every time They are more important. They have a series of limitations and Lithium is a finite resource With a high environmental impact, which is a problem if we want to electrify mobility. There the future solid state batteriesbut meanwhile, a group of NJIT researchers He has had an idea to give more life to the current technology: squeeze the maximum current batteries.
As? With multivent ion batteries.
Multivalent ions. A team of researchers from the New Jersey Institute -Njit- had an idea. If lithium is key to current batteries, but also scarce, We could use more abundant elements such as magnesium, calcium, aluminum or zinc as a replacement or to ‘dopar’ current batteries. The objective was to maintain, at least, the properties of current batteries and, if possible, improve storage benefits without depending on lithium.
There the multive ion batteries come into play. If Ion-Litio have only one load, multiveous ion batteries that use the aforementioned elements allow two or even three positive charges. This property, in theory, allows you to store more energy by ion.
Not everything is perfect. This property, as exposed in the studyit allows to store more energy by ion, but if they are not used it is because they present an important technical challenge. Multivalent ions are larger than lithium and have a greater load, which makes their movement difficult within current materials.
To make it easy, imagine that the interior of the cells of a lithium -ion battery is a sponge with a certain number of recesses that catch particles. In a multivete ion battery, it has more holes and each one catches more particles, but the sponge is also greater.
Accelerated by AI. That was the great limitation of the technological industry, but what NJIT researchers have done is to put the artificial intelligence To work. In this context, the use of AI is ideal because it allows simulating a large range of possibilities, of which the most convincing to test them. The end of the AI was to find new viable compounds to create multive ion batteries and, for this, they used a dual approach.
On the one hand, a model called CDVAE (Variational Crystal Dissemination Self -coach) that was trained with known crystalline structures to generate new materials. On the other, a model of LLM LLM LANGUAGE Aphinated to select only the most thermodynamically stable structures. When they finished the work, they discovered five new porous metal oxides that are shown as ideal for transporting multivalent ions quickly and safely.
“One of the greatest obstacles was not the lack of promising chemicals for batteries, but the practical impossibility of trying millions of material combinations,” said Dibakar Datta, leader of the research team. “We resort to generative artificial intelligence as a rapid and systematic way to explore that vast panorama and detect the few structures that multivalent batteries could really do practices.”
Structures isolated by AI models. Section A is that of the CDVAE. The B is that of LLM
Beyond the batteries. The team states that it validated the structures generated by AI using mechanical-chanting simulations and stability tests, confirming that these isolated materials could be synthesized with great potential for applications in the real world. Currently, and with those results, from the NJIT they are collaborating with other laboratories to synthesize and test those materials designed by AI.
And something that Datta highlights is that, as a collateral effect on research, they have demonstrated once again that AI can be “a quick and scalable method to explore any advanced material, from electronics to clean energy solutions, without relying on extensive tests by test and error.” Once the best results are isolated, of course, it is time to try them in the real world, but much of the previous work It accelerates considerably.
A mere patch? Now, although changing the ‘formula’ of lithium -ion batteries can be a good patch, the objective of the industry is still put in the implementation of solid state batteries. The catalyst in them is not a liquid, but a solid that allows us to solve many of the problems of current batteries, while offering a Greater energy density and faster load times.
They are batteries that are already developed and that are being driven by Much of the automotive industrybut the problem is that it is a more expensive technology and is not settled. Bringing it to the real world, for example, Mercedes is already in itwhile other brands like BMW say that, for the moment, they are not in their plans due to precisely the price.
Images | NJIT, Cell Reports Physical Science, Kumpan Electric
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