Team develops world’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery

LESC believes the research brings forward the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage. Their findings, detailed in Nature Energy, demonstrate a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles.

“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of the paper.

LESC said that by removing the anode and using sodium instead of lithium, this new battery will be more affordable and environmentally friendly to produce. Through its solid-state design, the battery also will be safe and powerful.

To create a sodium battery with the energy density of a lithium battery, the team needed to invent a new sodium battery architecture.

Traditional batteries have an anode to store the ions while a battery is charging. While the battery is in use, the ions flow from the anode through an electrolyte to a cathode.