Qualcomm is helping address one of the auto industry's most pressing needs - scaling intelligent vehicle technology to meet growing consumer demand for vehicles that are automated, connected and highly personalised.
Lithium-ion batteries generally degrade fastest when held at a high state of charge, which means keeping your iPhone or your Mac's battery at 100 percent accelerates the chemical wear that permanently reduces its actual capacity over time.
When the Finnish startup unveiled its battery at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the specifications shocked the battery industry. How could an unknown company leapfrog Toyota, Factorial, and CATL in the solid-state race? The startup claimed 400 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, a 100,000-cycle lifespan and a charge time of roughly five minutes.
The team, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Institute of Technology, recently published their findings in Nature Communications. According to their research, the process not only avoids conventional leaching chemicals and extreme heat to extract lithium from old batteries, but it also uses carbon dioxide in what the authors call a sequestration step, and turns other battery transition metals into new catalysts - with CO₂-rich water doing most of the chemical work.