10/10/2019
John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham si Akira Yoshino primesc premiul Nobel in chimie pentru dezvoltarea unei tehnologii revolutionare in domeniul bateriilor Li Ion!
This year’s Chemistry Laureate John Goodenough doubled the lithium battery’s potential, creating the right conditions for a vastly more powerful and useful battery.
John Goodenough knew about fellow Chemistry Laureate M. Stanley Whittingham’s revolutionary battery, but his specialised knowledge of matter’s interior told him that its cathode could have a higher potential if it was built using a metal oxide instead of a metal sulphide. A few people in his research group were then tasked with finding a metal oxide that produced a high voltage when it intercalated lithium ions, but which did not collapse when the ions were removed.
This systematic search was more successful than John Goodenough had dared to hope. Whittingham’s battery generated more than two volts, but Goodenough discovered that the battery with lithium-cobalt oxide in the cathode was almost twice as powerful, at four volts.
One key to this success was John Goodenough’s realisation that batteries did not have to be manufactured in their charged state, as had been done previously. Instead, they could be charged afterwards. In 1980, he published the discovery of this new, energy-dense cathode material which, despite its low weight, resulted in powerful, high-capacity batteries. This was a decisive step towards the wireless revolution.
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino “for the development of lithium-ion batteries.”
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