PNNL

Whether rolled up like a tiny jellyroll and implanted into salmon or powering our electric vehicles and cell phones, rechargeable batteries are essential to our modern life. To run electric vehicles for practical distances, the U.S. Department of Energy has challenged chemists at research institutions nationwide to substantially increase the amount of energy that can be packed into future batteries.

"Optimistically, I think we can double the cell energy level, from about 250 watt-hours per kilogram to 500 watt-hours per kilogram," said Jie (Jay) Xiao, one of the leaders of a consortium of national labs and universities that are trying to do this.

Their plan is to replace the current graphite electrode, called the anode, with lithium metal. This doubles the energy because lithium metal is able to deliver almost 10-times higher capacity than carbon but only takes up a small portion of the space that the graphite — which is carbon, essentially the lead in your pencil — had been. One question Xiao is trying to answer is why lithium metal anodes gunk up into structures called dendrites and fail.

Xiao is also exploring how to improve the conventional lithium-ion batteries by improving the other electrode, the cathode, which balances a battery's anode.

Inspired to enter science as a child by breaking a glass syringe, Xiao wasted no time earning Young Researcher awards. She is also the recipient of The Electrochemical Society Battery Division Technology Award. She has 19 battery-related patents and counting. Xiao has also been named a Distinguished Inventor of Battelle, is a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society, and is routinely in the top 1-percent of researchers cited by other scientists in the field of materials chemistry, as measured by Clarivate Analytics.

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Watch how Xiao's tiny batteries that fit in salmon are put together (2:00)

Read more about Xiao’s battery research in C&E News(subscription may be required)