Next-Generation Battery Pioneer Sees Breakthroughs Coming
Carnegie Mellon’s Venkat Viswanathan talks about how robots and machine learning are accelerating progress.
About every eight minutes in Venkat Viswanathan’s laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University’s mechanical engineering department, two robots—Otto and Clio—complete an experiment that could help accelerate breakthroughs in lithium-ion batteries. Viswanathan, 35, studied mechanical engineering in Chennai at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras before turning to fluid dynamics and batteries at Stanford. Now he leads a group at Carnegie Mellon focused on improvements that could help power passenger aircraft with a technology that, 30 years ago, was only for camcorders.
To build batteries that could enable electric long-haul trucks and aircraft would require changes to the four main components: two electrodes—cathode and anode—between which trillions of charged lithium atoms travel; an electrolyte that enables the movement of those ions; and the separator that prevents electrodes from coming into contact and causing fires.