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One of the greatest challenges in the fight against climate change is energy storage. Fossil fuel essentially stores itself, with its energy locked inside its own chemical bonds. But how do you store more sustainable, but otherwise ephemeral, forms of energy, like the power of the wind and sun?

For Eric Detsi, Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), the answer is batteries, with the caveat that batteries powerful enough to meet the future's energy demands—the International Energy Agency projects that worldwide battery capacity will need to sextuple by 2030—do not yet exist.

In most batteries used today, from the disposable alkaline batteries in household appliances like alarm clocks to the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in hybrid and electric vehicles, the electrodes between which ions flow are typically made of solid materials like metal oxides or graphite. But, as Detsi points out, each cycle of charging and discharging the battery damages the material, because the electrodes expand and contract, sometimes by as much as 300%, which is one of the reasons why even rechargeable batteries gradually lose capacity and eventually fail.

"There is a need for materials that can store a large amount of lithium, sodium and magnesium for use in high-performance batteries," says Detsi. "The problem is that the more lithium, sodium or magnesium a battery material can store, the more it expands and shrinks during charging and discharging, resulting in huge volume change."

Some researchers, including the late 2019 Nobel laureate John Goodenough, one of the fathers of lithium-ion batteries, recently started to develop batteries with liquid electrodes, which don't break when their volume changes. But liquid electrodes present other challenges, namely the difficulty of safely manufacturing and using batteries that behave like water balloons. In other words, just building larger or liquid batteries won't work—to design the batteries of the future, researchers will need to create entirely new materials.

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