When was lithium battery invented

In fact, you almost certainly own some. Consider the last six or seven decades of technological and scientific leaps: the polio vaccine, space rocketry, the Arpanet predecessor of the internet. The first of these outsized inventions is the transistor, which, created in at Bell Labs, transformed electronics, a foundation of the global economy and contemporary civilization.

The second is the lithium-ion battery. Commercialized by Sony in , lithium-ion took the clunky electronics enabled by the transistor and made them portable. Unlike the transistor, the lithium-ion battery has not won a Nobel Prize.

But many people think it should. The lithium-ion battery gave the transistor reach. Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. There would be no Apple. No Samsung. No Tesla. His brainchild was the cobalt-oxide cathode, the single most important component of every lithium-ion battery.

Others have tried to improve on the cobalt-oxide cathode, but all have failed. Today, at 92, Goodenough still goes to his smallish office every day at the University of Texas at Austin.

When solar and wind power produce electricity, it must be either used immediately or lost forever—there is no economic stationary battery in which to store the power. Meanwhile, storm clouds are gathering: Oil is again cheap but, like all cyclical commodities, its price will go back up. The climate is warming and becoming generally more turbulent. In short, the world needs a super-battery. The good news is that Goodenough has one last idea.

I still have time to go. With that, Goodenough hoots, possibly the strangest laugh of any scientist on the planet. Listen to it here. A battery is basically a device for making electrically charged atoms—known as ions—travel from one point to another. When electrical charges move, they create an electric current.

This current powers anything connected to the battery. To make a battery, therefore, you need two electrodes, between which the ions will do their traveling. In the middle, you need a substance for them to travel through, called an electrolyte.

One electrode is negatively charged, and is called the anode. The other, positively charged, is the cathode. When the battery is discharging—i. Almost everything in battery design comes down to the materials of which the anode, cathode, and electrolyte are made.

They determine how many ions the battery can store and how fast it can pump them out. In the early twentieth century, electric cars powered by lead-acid batteries lead for the electrodes, sulfuric acid for the electrolyte seemed superior to rivals featuring gasoline-powered internal combustion engines.

But electrics were quiet and easy to maneuver compared with the noisy and dirty combustion engines, with their aggravating hand cranks. Then, a series of inventions, including the electric starter, gave combustion the advantage. For decades, few seemed to think that things should be different. But in , Ford Motor—which with the Model T and the assembly line had done more than any company to make combustion mainstream—tried to bring back the electric car. It announced a battery with a sulfur cathode and a sodium anode.

It was a new way of thinking—a light battery that could store 15 times more energy than lead-acid in the same space. There were disadvantages, of course. Realistically, the battery was practical only for stationary storage, for electric power stations.

Yet at first, both Ford and the public disregarded prudence. With its promise of clean electric cars, Ford captured the imagination of a s population suddenly conscious of the smog engulfing its cities.

In the initial stages, electric Fords using lead-acid batteries could travel 40 miles 64 km at a top speed of 40 miles an hour. As the new sulfur-sodium batteries came into use, cars would travel miles at highway speeds, Ford claimed. You would recharge for an hour, and then drive another miles. Such talk created an excitement resembling the commercially inventive 19th century all over again. Around the world, researchers sought to emulate and, if they could, best Ford.

A rechargeable battery with the ability to store electricity is a key device for solving environmental problems. This became more widely recognized around , when electric vehicles EVs came on the scene. That was the year the Nissan Leaf was launched.

It was a truly epoch-making advance. From then on, lithium-ion batteries were used to power EVs. Since then, a lot of progress has been made in improving the energy density of lithium-ion batteries i.

But issues around durability the life of the battery still need to be overcome. Although lithium-ion batteries alone will not solve all environmental problems, when combined with other new innovations, like artificial intelligence AI and the Internet of Things, they will be central to building a sustainable society.

The fundamental spirit of patent law is to encourage technological development for the benefit of all. In return for acquiring exclusive patent rights, you reveal [disclose] a new technology to the world, and thereby support its broad dissemination.

That is what happened with lithium-ion batteries. Asahi Kasei was good at developing battery technology, but was not a battery specialist, so we had to decide what kind of business to build around the technology. The licensing program opened lithium-ion battery technology up to many new manufacturers, which allowed for the technology to be improved in terms of its cost, reliability and safety.

It also helped the technology to spread, strengthened consumer confidence and generated licensing revenues for the company. Everyone could access the technology quickly and benefit from it. Even if you tell people not to imitate, they do!

Moreover, patent rights are time limited so it is very difficult to take advantage of their economic value through licensing alone. I think it is important to think about other ways to get a payback or financial return. For example, this might involve developing a business model around lithium-ion batteries where the technology is commercialized as a service, rather than an end product, and you receive downstream payments.

Platforms like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon use this model. This has caused them to recognize the influence that lithium ion battery development has had and how lithium ion batteries will play a critical part in future power revolutions. As such, high-tech electrochemical gas analysis systems are provided by Hiden Analytical for the future of lithium ion battery development.

To learn more about our role in lithium ion battery development , contact us. The Beginning of the Lithium Battery For many years, the only suitable battery for portable equipment, such as mobile computing and wireless communications was nickel-cadmium. This website uses cookies to improve your experience.

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Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These modifications can be easily scaled-up using the present multi-step manufacturing processes for NMC materials. The program is working to develop next-generation lithium-metal battery cells delivering up to watt hours per kilogram versus the current average of about watt hours per kilogram.

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