Magnesium ion battery technology may be a breakthrough

Although we hear about "battery breakthroughs" every now and then, lithium-ion batteries are still the most widely used and best-performing choice. But recently, a team of researchers at the MIT blog lab and argonne national laboratory have developed a new solid material.

It appears to be an excellent conductor of magnesium ions and could be used to make safer and more efficient batteries. Lithium batteries are used in everything from mobile phones to electric cars, and while the metal serves them well, there is still plenty of room for improvement in efficiency and price.

In experiments conducted in thespecial magnetic resonance laboratory, the researchers demonstrated that the new material is a highly efficient conductor of magnesium ions.

Magnesium, by contrast, has a higher energy density and more reserves in nature, which promises to make batteries cheaper and easier to produce. To use magnesium in a battery, however, you have to get past electrolytes.

While both Toyota and KIT have recently focused on developing better liquid electrolytes, they have a tendency to corrode other parts of the battery. So we thought, why not try another type of electrolyte?

"Magnesium-based batteries are a completely new technology that doesn't have any good liquid electrolytes," said GerbrandCeder, co-author of the study. So we thought, why not switch to a solid electrolyte?

The good news is that they really developed a called "selenide scandium magnesia spinel" (magnesiumscandiumselenidespinel) new material. This solid electrolyte allows magnesium ions to pass through easily and is as conductive as the solid electrolyte used in some lithium batteries.

Initial theoretical studies had predicted good results, and to test them, the team conducted NMR spectroscopy experiments. The instrument can detect whether magnesium (or lithium) ions are penetrating the material, but the new material is complex and lacks references, making it difficult for them to interpret the data.

PieremanueleCanepa, who worked on the study, says that the findings make sense only when combined with a variety of technical methods (solid state NMR and synchronous measurements at argonne), in addition to traditional electrochemical characterization.

Even so, there are some issues to be resolved before the new magnesium-based material can be used to build real batteries. For example, there is still a small amount of electronic leakage, and electronic mobility needs to be improved. However, solid-state batteries are still much safer than conventional liquid electrolyte batteries after commercial use.

Details of the study were published in a recent issue of the journal NatureCommunications.

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