In late 2015, a team of Cambridge University researchers led by ECS member Clare Grey, detailed research in the journal Science on the path to the “ultimate” battery. According to the study, the researchers stated they had successfully demonstrated how to overcome many of the problems preventing the theoretically promising lithium-air battery from being commercially viable.
The key component to this research relies on a highly porous, “fluffy” carbon electrode made from graphene. The researchers cautioned that although the preliminary results were very promising, much work was yet to be done to take lithium-air batteries from the lab to the marketplace.
However, the research got many scientists in energy science and technology talking. Like all groundbreaking results, there has been much discussion and some controversy over the research published by Grey and her team.
K.M. Abraham, ECS member and professor at Northeastern University, is one of the scientists that is not 100 percent convinced by the team’s results. As one of the inventors of lithium-air technology, Abraham recently penned his rebuttal and sat down with his university for a Q&A session to more fully tackle the topic.
In the article, Abraham discusses his 1996 publication in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, where he initially talked about the “novel rechargeable” lithium-air battery.
Check out 3Qs with K.M. Abraham and read his full commentary on the Cambridge University research in Science.
[Image: CC0 via Pixabay]
