‘Spillway’ for electrons could keep lithium metal batteries from catching fire:
https://phys.org/news/2020-03-spillway-electrons-lithium-metal-batteries.html
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego developed a safety feature that prevents lithium metal batteries from rapidly heating up and catching fire in case of an internal short circuit.
The team made a clever tweak to the part of the battery called the separator, which serves as a barrier between the anode and cathode, so that it slows down the flow of energy (and thus heat) that builds up inside the battery when it short circuits.
The researchers, led by UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Ping Liu and his Ph.D. student Matthew Gonzalez, detail their work in a paper published in Advanced Materials.
“We’re not trying to stop battery failure from happening. We’re making it much safer so that when it does fail, the battery doesn’t catastrophically catch on fire or explode,” said Gonzalez, who is the paper’s first author.
Very interesting.
Thanks!