New Battery Could Recharge in Seconds

In energy storage, there has always been a trade-off between the amount of energy a material could store and how quickly you could discharge it. Batteries were pretty good at storing energy (although not nearly as good as oil), but getting energy into and out of them was tough. Ultracapacitors, and their cousins, supercapacitors, can deliver a lot of charge really quickly, but it takes 20 times more of their materials to store the same energy as a comparable battery.

The new battery material appears to solve that problem by creating a “fast-lane” for ions to move around the lithium iron phosphate material. By applying a special surface coating to the old material, they allow the ions to speed around the battery at rates that are nearly unimaginable.