Lithium-ion battery inventor dies at 100

American John Goodenough, the 2019 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry for co-developing lithium-ion batteries that revolutionized electric charging technology, died on June 25 in Austin, Texas.

Professor John Goodenough has worked at the University of Texas for nearly 40 years. Photo: AP

The University of Texas announced on June 26 that Professor Goodenough had passed away but did not mention the cause of his death. Professor Goodenough had worked at the University of Texas for nearly 40 years, according to AP . He was the oldest person to be awarded the Nobel Prize. He shared the prize with American scientist M. Stanley Whittingham and Japanese researcher Akira Yoshino. Goodenough once shared that he was very grateful that he was not forced to retire at the age of 65.

Goodenough's research revolutionized the way we charge mobile phones, tablets, and anything else with a plug. Lithium-ion batteries, the world's first portable and rechargeable battery, took more than a decade to develop. Whittingham said in 2019 that he had no idea his decades-old research would have such a profound impact on the world. "We thought it was a good invention and useful for some things, but we never dreamed it would revolutionize the electronics industry and everything else," Goodenough said.

Goodenough, Whittingham, and Yoshino each made breakthroughs that helped launch the development of commercial rechargeable batteries, for which they shared the $900,000 Nobel Prize. Whittingham’s work in the 1970s exploited the tendency of lithium, the lightest metal, to create batteries that could produce more than 2 volts of electricity. In 1980, building on Whittingham’s research, Goodenough doubled the battery’s capacity to 4 volts by using cobalt oxide in the cathode, one of the battery’s two poles.

That battery was still too explosive for commercial use. Yoshinon’s work in the decade eliminated flammable pure lithium in batteries and replaced it with safer lithium ions. The first commercially available, lightweight, safe, durable, and rechargeable battery hit the market in 1991.

Born in Jena, Germany, in 1922, Goodenough grew up in the United States and earned a PhD in chemistry from the University of Chicago. He began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research laid the foundation for the development of random-access memory for digital computers. Goodenough was director of the Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry at Oxford University in England when he invented the lithium-ion battery. He moved to the University of Texas in 1986, where he continued to teach and research battery materials, solid-state science, and engineering issues while winning the Nobel Prize. Goodenough married his wife, Irene, for 70 years until her death in 2016.

An Khang (According to AP )

Source link