The US government is to focus vast super supercomputer resources on lithium air battery technology, aiming to power electric cars for 500 miles per charge.
Through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, a research team including scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Argonne National Laboratory and IBM will use two of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
"Argonne is committed to developing lithium air technologies," said its director Eric Isaacs. "The obstacles to Li-air batteries becoming a viable technology are formidable, but the modelling and simulation capabilities of Department of Energy's supercomputers will help us accelerate the innovations required in materials science, chemistry and engineering."
ORNL director Thom Mason said the battery project was the result of two visits to Oak Ridge in 2009 by IBM's v-p of research. "From those discussions, it became apparent that our partnership had many of the unique capabilities needed to tackle a scientific problem as important and challenging as increasing by more than a factor of 10 the energy stored in batteries for transportation."