AI generates full battery electrolyte recipes, matching top lithium metal battery performance
Battery electrolytes aren’t just one chemical, but a complex mixture of salts, solvents, and additives interacting and reacting with each other. Artificial intelligence has made great headway in helping select ideal materials to go into that chemical soup. But a team from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) is using AI to generate the entire formulation, balancing the complicated tradeoffs and interactions that go into the electrolytes that make batteries possible.
Designing a battery is a three-part process. You need a positive electrode, you need a negative electrode, and—importantly—you need an electrolyte that works with both electrodes.
Discovering new, powerful electrolytes is one of the major bottlenecks in designing next-generation batteries for electric vehicles, phones, laptops and grid-scale energy storage.
A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a new approach to speeding up the process of creating ever more optimized batteries. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes how they paired a unique type of robot with an AI learning system to…