Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a scalable, low-cost method to improve the joining of materials in solid-state batteries, resolving one of the big challenges in the commercial development of safe, long-lived energy storage systems. Solid-state batteries incorporate a safer, fast-charging architecture featuring a solid-state electrolyte versus the liquid electrolytes in today’s lithium-ion batteries. A successful solid-state commercial battery system could provide at least two times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries in a much smaller footprint. The system would enable electric vehicles with vastly improved driving range, for example. One of the challenges in manufacturing solid-state batteries is the difficulty of getting materials to join properly and to remain stable during repeated cycles of charging and discharging. Scientists studying methods in a lab to overcome this characteristic, called contact impedance, have so far focused on applying high pressures and other methods. But […]