An EV battery material that gets better with age? Korean researchers found the switch

Electric-vehicle batteries built on cheap, abundant manganese could store about 20% more energy than today's standard cathodes — if only they did not fade with use. At POSTECH in South Korea, Professors Jihyun Hong and Kyu-Young Park's teams watched what happens inside such a cathode over hundreds of charges, and found the culprit — and the opportunity. As oxygen slowly escapes, the material's tidy layers shuffle into a disordered structure that was long blamed for decay; controlled carefully, that same disorder opens new pathways for lithium, adding usable capacity. By managing the oxygen loss, the team kept 98.4% of the battery's performance after more than 200 charge cycles. 'Battery degradation can be delayed and battery lifetime extended simply by controlling parameters such as operating temperature,' said Hong. The study appears in Energy & Environmental Science.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation