Fully charged electric vehicle in an hour?

Fast charging is, according to University of California (UC) San Diego engineers, possible if lithium-metal crystals are seeded and grown on a ‘surprising’ uniform surface.

Their advance used a crystal-growing surface that lithium doesn’t “like” and ultimately enabled them to charge lithium-metal batteries in about an hour, a speed that is competitive compared to lithium-ion batteries.

Uniform layers of lithium metal are of great interest to battery researchers because they lack battery-performance-degrading spikes called “dendrites”.

The formation of these dendrites in battery anodes is a longstanding roadblock to fast-charging ultra-energy-dense lithium-metal batteries.

UC San Diego Nanoengineering Professor Ping Liu said: “We challenged the traditional notion of what kind of surface is needed to grow lithium crystals. The prevailing wisdom is that lithium grows better on surfaces that it likes, surfaces that are lithiophilic.

“In this work, we show that is not always true.”