|
About:
|
One solution may be to get more use out of what we already have. With more than a million electric cars sold worldwide in 2017, a number increasing rapidly, scientists are studying how to recycle lithium on a massive scale. Some are considering whether bacteria could help them achieve this.
In future, it will be important to design Energy Storage Battery that can be easily disassembled, to reuse the metals they contain. Lithium is also a very reactive metal, presenting challenges for people tasked with handling it.
There are also potential alternatives to lithium. For example, sodium-ion batteries are gathering interest from EV manufacturers due to their lower cost. They work similarly to lithium-ion batteries but sodium is heavier and stores less energy.
Somewhat further into the future are multivalent batteries, where the ion that moves between electrodes has a greater charge than lithium and so delivers more than one electron each to the circuit. There are substantial challenges for scientists to overcome with these batteries, but they could potentially deliver even higher energy storage.
Building enough electric cars at a price that will make them cheaper than fossil fuelled alternatives is a major challenge. At the fore of battery research, scientists are working to solve this problem and revolutionise how we travel.
|
