There is  no realistic end to what all human beings can do, but truth be told, there is still very little that we do better than pursuing growth on a consistent basis. This tendency to improve, no matter the situation, has brought the world some huge milestones, with technology emerging as quite a major member of the group. The reason why we hold technology in such a high regard is, by and large, predicated upon its skill-set, which guided us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look beyond the surface for a second, it will become abundantly clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired from the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component, in fact, did a lot to give the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and as a result, initiate a full-blown tech revolution. Of course, this revolution eventually went on to scale up the human experience through some outright unique avenues, but even after achieving a feat so notable, technology will somehow continue to bring forth the right goods. The same has turned more and more evident in recent times, and assuming one new discovery ends up with the desired impact, it will only put that trend on a higher pedestal moving forward.

The researching team at Georgia Institute of Technology has successfully developed a method, which involves using aluminum foil to create batteries with higher energy density and greater stability. While it’s not our first ever attempt at leveraging aluminum to make batteries, the previous experiments have all observed one dominating obstacle. The obstacle is that, when used in a conventional lithium-ion battery, the aluminum would fracture and basically fail within a few charge-discharge cycles. So, how did the new study go about solving this conundrum? Well, the researchers, rather than using pure aluminum in the foils, made a decision to integrate small amounts of other materials to the aluminum to create foils with particular “microstructures,” or arrangements of different materials. Here, they literally tested over 100 different materials to understand how they behaved in batteries.

“We needed to incorporate a material that would address aluminum’s fundamental issues as a battery anode,” said Yuhgene Liu, first author of the paper. “Our new aluminum foil anode demonstrated markedly improved performance and stability when implemented in solid-state batteries, as opposed to conventional lithium-ion batteries.”

Going by the available details, the team discovered that the aluminum anode could store more lithium than conventional anode materials, and therefore, store more energy. The stated discovery meant they had these high energy density batteries that could potentially outperform lithium-ion batteries. However, the new technology isn’t just equipped to offer you operational efficiency, but it also delivers at your disposal an option significantly more cost-effective than its veteran alternatives.

“One of the benefits of our aluminum anode that we’re excited about is that it enables performance improvements, but it also can be very cost-effective,” said Matthew McDowell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. “On top of that, when using a foil directly as a battery component, we actually remove a lot of the manufacturing steps that would normally be required to produce a battery material.”

For the future, though, the researchers are working to expand the size of the batteries to understand how size influences the aluminum’s behavior. Beyond that, concrete efforts are already underway to explore other materials and microstructures, as the team hopes to create even cheaper foils for battery systems.

“This is a story about a material that was known about for a long time, but was largely abandoned early on in battery development,” McDowell said. “But with new knowledge, combined with a new technology—the solid-state battery we’ve figured out how we can rejuvenate the idea and achieve really promising performance.”