Growing Lithium for a More Efficient Battery

Carnegie Mellon Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Venkat Viswanathan, discusses growing lithium into certain shapes to create energy-dense batteries. Watch this video to hear more about building batteries of the future.

Transcript

00:00:11 Morphogenesis is an important concept in biology that connects form and function. Morpho, or morphology, relates to the shape of a particular object, and the shape often decides how that particular object usually sustains. For example, you know, leaves point towards the sun such that they are absorbing sunlight and they are able to get the nutrients that are needed. Oftentimes, they grow flat or they grow curved. This is to adapt to the kinds of nutrient structure that they have or other kinds of resource constraints that they have. Now, the very same issues are present in energy storage devices, especially when you have lithium metal batteries.

00:01:03 What you have to do is to grow lithium when you charge the battery, and then remove lithium when you discharge the battery. This in a sense is the same as morphogenesis, except that we don't actually have ways to directly link form and function. One of the major challenges in batteries is the safety associated with batteries. They often catch fire, and this is related to the fact that you form these protrusions called dendrites that short circuit the anode and the cathode. That is there's a wire-like filament that grows between the anode and the cathode. In order to avoid that, what you have to do is to regulate the morphology. The goal of our MINT program is to design morphogenic interfaces, abbreviated

00:01:53 as MINT, to regulate the growth of lithium inside the battery much like how biology regulates growth. So the vision here is, can we learn about how to grow a flat leaf to how to grow a flat lithium? If we are able to grow a flat lithium, then we can make extremely energy-dense batteries that are extremely long-lasting, and don't require additional apparatus to enable them to function, that is thermal regulation, as well as pressure regulation, usually pressure fixtures that keep the battery in place. The goal of this MINT program is to realize all of this, and then build an all-solid state lithium metal battery that is high-performant, as well as highly capable in a broad range

00:02:41 of use conditions.