solidenergy-battery_w_600We are constantly hearing about new advancements being made to batteries, like how they are being made safer, more stable, and longer-lasting. Recently a MIT-spinoff called SolidEnergy has claimed to developed a new type of lithium-ion battery that can not only store more energy, thus resulting in longer-lasting battery life, but it can also survive hundreds of charging cycles at the same time.

How are they achieving this? By replacing graphite anodes found in normal lithium-ion batteries with a metal anode. Graphite anodes have a limit to how much energy it can store, which is 600Whr per liter, but by turning to an ultra-thin metal anode, they were able to double its capacity to 1,200Whr per liter.

The company has plans to offer their batteries to companies developing smartphones as well as companies manufacturing electric vehicles, however the durability of their batteries at the moment isn’t very ideal for electric vehicles at the moment. In fact the company has chosen Google’s Project Ara to be the first phone to use their new batteries.

Speaking to Forbes, SolidEnergy founder and CEO Dr. Qichao Hu was quoted as saying, “Our battery basically makes the Project Ara phone more practical. Right now, one of the major challenges with this phone is that the battery life is too short.” Project Ara’s commercial availability is still some ways to go, but hopefully we can look forward to better battery life thanks to SolidEnergy’s efforts.

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