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Writer's pictureSophie O'Brien

A review article: The Living Battery: The Bioinspired Redesign of Lithium-ion Batteries



Have a look at our open access article on lithium-ion battery manufacturing and the exploration of bioinspired alternatives! The article is published in the International Journal of High School Research, Volume 6, issue 4, 2024. This was originally an entry for the Toshiba Exploravision contest (2023, Honorable Mention, NY State) that we converted to a topic for this review article. Thank you IJHSR for publishing our work!


The abstract is below, and the link to the volume and PDF of the article is here:


ABSTRACT: Lithium-ion batteries are secondary (rechargeable) batteries of unparalleled importance in today’s society. The lithium-ion battery has enabled a revolution in portable electronics and has created a rapidly growing market for energy storage that can help support the green economy. However, the manufacture of batteries is not without geopolitical and environmental consequences. The battery comprises electrode materials, electrolytes, and separators that rely on minerals and resources, with damaging mining consequences, pollutive manufacturing, and insufficient recycling. Future technologies can potentially help mitigate these problems by drawing on inspiration from nature to solve problems related to materials and device design. The bioinspiration approach looks at the functionality of biological systems and how they harness or store energy. Bioinspiration is powerful because the biological tools of nature have evolved over millions of years, are very adaptive, and present various creative, sustainable, efficient, and biodegradable solutions to redesign the lithium-ion battery. We present an overview of the technology within lithium-ion batteries, their rising significance, and their increase in production. We review how bioinspired approaches to batteries will enable us to meet some of the challenges we face with increasing dependence on this technology.  KEYWORDS: Materials Science; Biomaterials; Batteries and Energy Storage; Sustainability; Bioinspired Materials Science.

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