Better batteries through biology?


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Lithium-air batteries have become a hot research area in recent years: They hold the promise of drastically increasing power per battery weight, which could lead, for example, to electric cars with a much greater driving range. But bringing that promise to reality has faced a number of challenges, including the need to develop better, more durable materials for the batteries’ electrodes and improving the number of charging-discharging cycles the batteries can withstand.


The new work is described in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, co-authored by graduate student Dahyun Oh, professors Angela Belcher and Yang Shao-Horn, and three others. The key to their work was to increase the surface area of the wire, thus increasing the area where electrochemical activity takes place during charging or discharging of the battery.







Belcher emphasizes that this is early-stage research, and much more work is needed to produce a lithium-air battery that’s viable for commercial production. This work only looked at the production of one component, the cathode; other essential parts, including the electrolyte — the ion conductor that lithium ions traverse from one of the battery’s electrodes to the other — require further research to find reliable, durable materials. Also, while this material was successfully tested through 50 cycles of charging and discharging, for practical use a battery must be capable of withstanding thousands of these cycles.

While these experiments used viruses for the molecular assembly, Belcher says that once the best materials for such batteries are found and tested, actual manufacturing might be done in a different way. This has happened with past materials developed in her lab, she says: The chemistry was initially developed using biological methods, but then alternative means that were more easily scalable for industrial-scale production were substituted in the actual manufacturing.

Jie Xiao, a research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who was not involved in this work, calls it “a great contribution to guide the research on how to effectively manipulate” catalysis in lithium-air batteries. She says this “novel approach … not only provides new insights for lithium-air batteries,” but also “the template introduced in this work is also readily adaptable for other catalytic systems.”

In addition to Oh, Belcher, and Shao-Horn, the work was carried out by MIT research scientists Jifa Qi and Yong Zhang and postdoc Yi-Chun Lu. The work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

Topics: Batteries, Biological engineering, Koch Institute, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical engineering, Biomaterials, Energy, Viruses


Can anyone give a little bit explanations why and how biological batteries can increase the distance or time between chargers. Is that because biological battery has more potential energy, or longer battery life? Is that because virus and bacteria are smaller than metal ion, so the increased surface area during reaction generates more energy? Will the cold weather in Maine or the high temperature in Fl influence the usage biological battery?

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