Stanford researchers seek 'Holy Grail' in battery design

Very interesting. I'll be following this. My research is actually in designing and understanding lithium-ion anodes.

If you're curious, the material I'm using consists of an all-carbon anode with crystalline and amorphous domains. It performs about the same as current state of the art Li-ion battery anodes; however, the cost of manufacturing is incredibly cheap since the composite material is derived from low-cost plant matter (lignin). Plus, it lasts for many more charge-discharge cycles (well, there's actually a trade-off between capacity and cycling performance; you have to pick a middle-ground).

I'm performing reactive molecular dynamics simulations on computational models of these new composite systems to try and understand why they have such high performance. It's pretty cool work really.

The head researcher here, Yi Cui, is a pretty baller dude. I met him at a PhD admit visitation weekend, and his group was the most popular by far. Some of the admitted students joked that competition to get into his group was harder than getting into Stanford in the first place.

I suspect that his research success is partly due to some snowball effect though - he has an extraordinary amount of postdocs working for him and access to a lot of money/equipment - which are both pretty great assets to have in engineering (and tend to grow as a function of present size).

Anyway, not to take away from the research he's doing. A lot of the stuff he puts out is very cool; I look forward to seeing more.

>"Of all the materials that one might use in an anode, lithium has the greatest potential. Some call it the Holy Grail," said Yi Cui, a Stanford professor of materials science and engineering and leader of the research team. "It is very lightweight and it has the highest energy density. You get more power per volume and weight, leading to lighter, smaller batteries with more power."

while it is theoretically true, the lithium is only part of the whole weight. The metals of the same group - potassium or sodium (though sodium seems to have more issues than potassium) anode looks order of magnitude easier (on the order of Al anodes while still being rechargeable) and provide almost the close to lithium perf/weight when whole battery is considered.

Sweet, partner with any battery manufacturer, Tesla, or the US military and lets get this technology fast-tracked. Higher density batteries can't come soon enough.

This begs the followup question, "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen Tesla?"