The union between Nissan and NASA aims to create the next generation of revolutionary batteries.
The car company Nissan and the US space agency NASA have announced their cooperation to manufacture a solid-state battery , which could completely revolutionize the industry.
These types of batteries can change the landscape of vehicles, including those that travel outside the planet, because they would cost less than traditional lithium-ion batteries, thus also giving a higher energy density, charging faster and lasting longer. weather.
The problem that the union will have to solve is key: at the moment, solid-state batteries only exist in laboratories.
The next step for batteries
The lithium-ion batteries used today in everything from smartphones to electric vehicles rely on a liquid electrolyte to move lithium ions between a graphite anode (negative electrode) and a cathode (positive electrode), which can be made of various materials.
Solid -state batteries exchange the liquid electrolyte for a solid one, which increases the energy density by two or more times. Efforts to develop these batteries have been plagued with complications, including finding an effective replacement for the separator (the component that keeps the anode and cathode apart while allowing lithium ions to pass through) and solving problems such as oxidative degradation and dendrite formation.
The Nissan-NASA initiative is similar to the one announced more than two years ago by IBM and Mercedes-Benz; the computing powerhouse and the automaker planned to use both classical and quantum computing to design solid-state batteries , including simulating the properties of molecules for solid-state lithium-sulfur batteries.
Likewise, the Nissan-NASA partnership is also focusing on batteries that do not rely on rare metals, such as cobalt, nickel or manganese.
NASA , specifically, will seek to find materials with properties comparable to those of said metals to replace them.
Nissan has targeted 2028 as the year to launch its own solid-state batteries .
