Lithium-ion battery technology is one of the foundations of our 21st century lifestyles and a great hope for green energy storage. And yet their development and improvement has not kept pace with the way other technologies have advanced.
In an ideal world, better batteries would have longer lifetimes, faster charging times, greater capacities and low cost. But the complex electrochemistry at work means that a tweak to improve one aspect of performance often reduces performance in other areas. That’s partly because the effects of chemical and material tweaks can often be too complex to unpick.
The new technology of quantum simulations has the potential to solve this problem. A quantum simulation reproduces the behavior of a material at the most fundamental chemical level. In theory, it ought to be possible to understand lithium-ion batteries perfectly, along with the effects of any tweaks.
The reality is a little different, however. Quantum simulations are powered by the emerging technology of quantum computing and, for the moment, the available computing power is limited. At the same time, there are only a few quantum algorithms for this kind of work. So determining the most promising way to exploit quantum simulations is hard for electrochemists.
