New research by a California-based team could change the way lithium-ion batteries are charged in consumer electronics products and electric cars, leading to longer lifetimes and more useful batteries.

The work, published on Sunday in the Nature Materials journal, challenges the commonly held notion that slowly charging a battery helps prolong its life and that it’s damaging to a battery if a large amount of energy is withdrawn in a short time.

“We’ve always thought of a battery as a [single] device, but inside an iPhone battery there are a few trillion particles,” said William Chueh, a senior author of the paper and researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, in an interview.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…