An Argument for Basic Battery Science: Each Time an Application Demands a New Battery Chemistry To Achieve Previously Unrealized Functionality, a New Fundamental Understanding Is Required

Batteries are the critical enabler of potentially new applications of electronics, ranging from an increasingly diverse set of portable applications to stationary grid level energy management. However, due to a paucity of fundamental understanding correlating atomic to mesoscale level phenomena with a full complement of bulk electrochemical properties, present day battery science is not sufficient to provide battery technology with the agility to address the unique set of challenges of power, capacity, capacity retention, safety, and other issues associated with each new potential application. Historically, battery design and engineering involved intuitive strategies of increasing size or component number or adding electronics to the battery. However, this strategy of optimization quickly exhausts any particular battery science, as the numerous documented cases of battery failures in the field attest. It is critical that battery science be explored both fundamentally and with an appreciation for application, to achieve previously unrealized functionality and to enable deliberate design of systems with the desired characteristics. This special issue of Accounts of Chemical Research highlights some of the notable current investigations in basic battery science.