Might lithium-sulfur batteries push solid-state aside as The Next Big Thing in battery technology? Silicon Valley battery tech company Lyten just came out of stealth mode at September's Motor Bella car show/mobility conference in metro Detroit after several years of federally funded research, and it made a very promising pitch: Triple the energy per weight! Charged ions of lithium metal do the heavy lifting in today's batteries. When your Tesla is tethered to the Supercharger, these ions migrate through the electrolyte, across the separator, and plate out on the anode. Then when you floor the accelerator, they head in the other direction, forming chemical bonds with the cathode material. In today's EVbatteries, these cathode materials (typically nickel/manganese/cobalt-oxide molecules) can only host 0.5 to 0.7 lithium ions each, whereas a single sulfur atom can host two lithium ions. Eureka- gravimetric densities jump from between 150 and 260 Wh/kg to 500 or more. Suddenly you'll get triple the range or lighten the battery weight by a third.
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