Are you tired of Li-ion yet? Then it’s time to go beyond it.

Those of you who are faithful followers of this blog (all 7 of you) should know that I come from the school of thought that you always need a better battery.  I even have a law for this, which I call the zeroth law of batteries and it states:

The performance of any battery will fall (just) short of our expectations irrespective of the complexity of the device it is powering.  

This is true for our cell phones and Roomba’s.  And true for electric cars and plug-in cars.

That is, unless you have low expectations. 

The world has seen some dramatic changes in battery technology over the last 20 years, ever since the Li-ion battery became commercial.  For one, the smartphone revolution would not have occurred if not for the batteries.  A lot of improvements are still possible with lithium-ion, and we project that battery energy densities will double when we succeed in controlling more energetic anode and cathode materials. 

But what happens after that?  At the pace at which my smartphone is evolving, with Retina Display screens, 4G networks, and movies playing off of the air, it’s hard to see a doubling in energy being enough. 

Question then is: What is after Li-ion batteries?  And is there something out there?

The answer is: Yes.  But getting there is not going to be easy. 

I wrote about this in two blog posts titled “A brief history of batteries- Part 1” and “Part 2”.  These two posts describe possible battery chemistries of the future and make the point that to succeed we really need to understand the past.  And it is written in the style of the movie “Pulp Fiction”. Can any battery textbook beat that?

I would suggest that you read this blog post first. 

Once you do that, you will want to know: So what is the progress in these chemistries in the two years that have elapsed since the blog post? 

You will get an answer to this question if you show up at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley CA between June 5-7, 2012 (a month from today)*.  This will be the venue of the 5^th in a series of symposia titled “Beyond Li-ion”.  In a 2 ½ day period various researchers, who are at the forefront of this field, will tell you what the latest trends are. 

It is an impressive speaker list, which you can see here. 

As a bonus, you will get to come to Berkeley Lab to see our Lab facilities.  More importantly, you may (I should emphasize the fact that this is a real possibility) actually get to shake my hand! 

To attend you will need to register, which you can do here.   

Hope to see you all (and I mean all 7 of you) there. 

Venkat

p.s.  Please don’t ask me to waive your registration fee.  Being a co-organizer means that I write blog posts to promote the meeting. It does not mean that I can come up with the cash to pay for your meals.




* The previous version wrongly gave the date of the conference as July.  It is June 5-7, 2012