Solid State Vehicle Batteries

 New directions in battery power for cars,   I have senn nasty examples of flaming wrecks, will ehi remove that danger.

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The Holy Grail of Electric Vehicles: Solid-State Batteries, By R. Colin Johnson

Commissioned by CACM Staff, February 7, 2023

Unlike flammable liquid-core Li-ion batteries, Blue Current’s solid-core silicon elastic composite solid-state batteries are smaller, safer, and will last the lifetime of an electric vehicle.

Rechargeable batteries have become the lifeblood of electronics, enabling the mobile revolution. Unfortunately, today's rechargeable batteries incorporate flammable liquid cores. That could change soon, however by switching to rechargeable batteries that have solid cores with nothing to spill, nothing to catch on fire, nothing to potentially explode.

The first rechargeable battery was invented in the mid-19th century, and replaced the crank handle on the front of Model Ts— the lead-acid battery, which is based upon a simple liquid sulfuric acid core. Because of their low cost and relatively large power-to-weight ratio, these batteries still provide the spark that starts today's internal combustion engines (ICEs).

The more advanced liquid-core lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles (EVs) are more expensive than lead-acid batteries, but they are worth it because they are lighter and smaller than lead-acid batteries providing the same amount of power, making them more suitable for mobile devices. Even the flammable liquid cores that make Li-ion batteries less safe than the liquid cores of lead-acid batteries are tolerated because of their reduced size.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), an Energy Innovation Hub led by DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, the Li-ion battery's flammable liquid core is on its way out. Not only is it flammable, but it also creates a toxic-waste disposal problem, introducing increasingly complex manufacturing problems and making the cost of electric vehicles (EVs) almost prohibitively high.

To remedy the problem, Argonne National Labs created JCESR, which designed a new generation of batteries with non-liquid solid cores — in the solid "state"—that are smaller, have higher energy density, and yet promise to return to the safety, ease of manufacturing, and lower cost of lead-acid batteries (once they are in mass production). Solid-state batteries were heralded as the "holy grail of batteries" — their solid-state core is the perfect complement to solid-state electronics — in the Technology Outlook 2030 report by market research firm DNV (Det Norske Veritas, which means "the Norwegian truth"). ... '