Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: 大臣官房人事課 — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

Akira Yoshino

born 1948 · Japan · Contemporary

Nobel Chemistry 2019

Created the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery, using a carbon-based anode.

Nobel Prize work

For the development of lithium-ion batteries. In 1985 Yoshino assembled the first viable prototype by pairing a petroleum-coke carbon anode, which stores lithium by intercalation, with a LiCoOX2\ce{LiCoO2} cathode — eliminating the dangerous metallic lithium of earlier cells. The design became the basis of Sony's first commercial Li-ion battery (1991) and of today's wireless, fossil-fuel-free portable technology.

Fields

Materials chemistry

Related topics

Lithium-ion, solid-state and lithium–sulfur batteries

Understand reversible lithium storage, cell voltage and capacity, and the materials and interfaces that limit liquid-electrolyte, solid-state, and lithium–sulfur batteries.

Chemists in the same field

Aleksey Yekimov (1945)Susumu Kitagawa (1951)Louis E. Brus (1943)Richard E. Smalley (1943)Dan Shechtman (1941)M. Stanley Whittingham (1941)