They are everywhere.
In a miniaturized version in our wireless headphones, hidden under the shell of our smartphones, our laptops and digital tablets, or even clipped into the frame of our assisted bicycles or welded to the chassis of our hybrid and electric cars.
Discreet but essential, batteries have established themselves in our daily lives and almost all share the same technology: lithium-ion.
Nothing could be more logical: accumulators using lithium, an ultra-light alkali metal of which China is the main exporter but which we should begin to extract in France in a few years, "are the best today, particularly in the field of electric mobility, because they offer the most energy per on-board mass, which is also called watts hours per kilo", explains Mathieu Morcrette, CNRS researcher and director of the Laboratory of Reactivity and Chemistry of Solids (LRCS) at Amiens (Somme).
Nothing revolutionary in their operation, which is inspired by those of storage batteries which produce an electric charge on the classic principle of a reversible exchange of its ions between two electrodes.
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