Mar 06, 2017 08:23 AM EST By Chris Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

One of the co-inventors of the lithium-ion battery declared that he and his team are developing a new battery that is three times more powerful than the li-on battery we are using now. What's more remarkable about this battery, he said, is that its main base is sodium instead of lithium.

John Goodenough, the co-inventor of the li-on battery, published their research that describes the new battery they are developing. The new battery, which has no name yet, will use glass instead of the liquid electrolyte being used nowadays and sodium will replace ion as the key material.

The 94-year-old inventor said that their decision to use glass instead of the electrolyte will make the new battery safer and charge faster. The reason why the present li-on batteries explode is because of the dendrites, the metal strands that grow on the batteries causing it to short circuit and explode. Glass, on the other hand, will not have the same problem.

Sodium, on the other hand, when coupled with oxygen have the potential to form batteries that perform much better and have a longer life cycle than their li-on counterparts.

More so, there are more sodium deposits than lithium; thus, if the new battery will become commercially practicable, it will be much cheaper than the lithium-ion battery.

Goodenough, however, added that the revolutionary battery is still at its early stages of development. If it becomes scalable and practicable, it will still take years before it can become commercially available. The lithium-ion battery, for example, only became available in the market ten years after its invention. Therefore, there is also a possibility that the sodium battery will take the same amount of years or more before it debuts commercially.

The research is published in the journal Energy & Environment Science.

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