As we develop more advanced mobile technology, as well as electric vehicles, batteries become increasingly important to our society. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the most commonly used, and the most dependable energy storage cells commercially available.
However, it is unlikely that this technology will remain unchanged in the years to come. The whole world has decided to shift the way it generates energy from fossil to low emission sources. A change like this one will most likely also favor the development of new energy storage technologies, in order to create more efficient batteries. Luckily, there are several concepts that we can use in order to develop more efficient energy cells. One of them is to replace lithium with “multivalent” metals.
This new technology would have the advantage of being far more efficient in terms of energy storage, due to the fact that multivalent metals would transfer more electrons per ion than lithium would. More electrons transferred would mean an increased storage capacity, while maintaining the same battery size. According to a team of scientists comprised of specialists from the University of Bath, Holland, Germany, France, and the United States of America, titanium dioxide could be used in order to manufacture multivalent batteries.
They showed that the technology is usable, by altering the titanium dioxide in order to form microscopic holes, which they proved can be filled with materials such as magnesium or aluminum(these materials carry more electrons per ion, and would be far superior to lithium).
While multivalent batteries would certainly be more efficient than the currently available lithium ones, as the world becomes more and more dependent on energy cells, more energy storage technologies are bound to appear.
