Aluminium is more plentiful and cheaper that lithium, making it potentially attractive for large-scale energy storage even if the technology never became light enough for automotive or phone use.
Aluminium also has the advantage over lithium that it can be used in metallic form without the safety concerns that metallic lithium arouses.
The Cornell team set out to discover why aluminium batteries develop short-circuits and die after only a few charge-discharge cycles – studying a simple cell where a metallic aluminium cathode faces a stainless steel anode across a glass fibre separator soaked in electrolyte.
