Some people say that the key to new energy technologies is batteries. Indeed, whether it is new energy vehicles, electronic products such as mobile phones, and even emerging drones, batteries are one of the most important factors limiting product performance. In order to achieve breakthroughs in the field of batteries, both the battery as a whole and the various components of the battery are the focus of research and development. New technologies and new materials are therefore constantly being applied.
      The National Institute of Materials Science recently announced that it has developed a new lithium battery with a very high energy density, and called this new lithium battery a "lithium air battery" whose energy density per unit volume is almost close to the limit. The cost can also be well controlled. According to the organization, “Lithium Air Battery” uses carbon nanotubes as the air electrode material, and the electrode structure can be optimized to achieve a high energy density, which is 15 times that of ordinary lithium batteries. The organization's researchers said that the current "lithium air battery" is only a test product, and will continue to optimize the design in the future to further increase the energy density.
      Battery life is one of the most important metrics. It claims to be the world's first solar-powered mobile phone battery. The battery, called Hybbi, consists mainly of lithium batteries and solar modules. This type of charging has extremely low energy losses and is twice as efficient as other solar charging products. The Hybbi solar panel is covered with gorilla glass and is laser cut to a thickness of less than 1 mm. In the case of direct sunlight, the charging speed can reach 20% of the electricity per hour.
      At the same time, new technologies have also been applied to the development of battery materials. Toyota Motor Corporation has announced that it will invest 35 million US dollars in research and development of new energy battery materials in the next four years. In Toyota's view, artificial intelligence will be a key way to find new materials for the future of new energy. As a new means, artificial intelligence-based computational models have recently been applied to the study of materials science. It can take decades to find new materials manually, but it can be accelerated by incorporating artificial intelligence into the computational model.
      Inspired by the structure of the tree, engineers at the University of Maryland in the United States remodeled the wood as a special structure for the negative electrode of lithium metal batteries to avoid battery failure caused by certain key factors. They proposed a new design to store lithium ions in batteries in natural channels for transporting water and nutrients in wood. The battery that comes out of this is very safe and can be quickly charged and discharged.