# New lithium-ion battery design inspired by a pomegranate



## TechSocial (Dec 20, 2011)

You only have to look at recent coverage of rechargeable battery research to notice were willing to try anything to pack more energy, more safely, into tiny battery packs. Germanium nanowires, sugar batteries, messy batteries, and batteries that cant explode are all recent developments. And now we have a new design ideaone that was inspired by a pomegranate.

A research team working at Stanford University and the Department of Energys SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used the design of a pomegranate to overcome a range of issues when creating a silicon-based lithium-ion battery.

A pomegranate holds its seeds tightly together as a cluster inside a thick skin. The researchers used that as a starting point and clustered together silicon nanoparticles inside a carbon rind to create a new anode. Initial testing showed it could be charged to 97 percent capacity even after 1,000 cycles. Thats important for a couple of reasons. The first is that 1,000 cycles as an initial target means the battery is commercially viable. Secondly, using silicon instead of graphite for the anode, which stores the energy, promises up to a 10x increase in capacity.

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