AI Comes Up With Battery Design That Uses 70 Per Cent Less Lithium

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Artificial intelligence can accelerate the process of finding and testing new materials, and now researchers have used that ability to develop a battery that is less dependent on the costly mineral lithium.

Lithium-ion batteries power many devices that we use every day as well as electric vehicles. [...] Finding a replacement for this crucial metal could be costly and time-consuming, requiring researchers to develop and test millions of candidates over the course of years. Using AI, Nathan Baker at Microsoft and his colleagues accomplished the task in months. They designed and built a battery that uses up to 70 per cent less lithium than some competing designs.

The researchers focused on a type of battery that only contains solid parts, and they looked for new materials for the battery component that electric charges move through, called the electrolyte. They started with 23.6 million candidate materials designed by tweaking the structure of established electrolytes and swapping out some lithium atoms for other elements. An AI algorithm then eliminated the materials that it calculated would be unstable, as well as those in which the chemical reactions that make batteries work would be weak. The researchers also considered how each material would behave while the battery was actively working. After only a few days, their list contained just a few hundred candidates, some of which had never been studied before.

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