Wayne Lewis
June 29, 2026

Key takeaways

• Banking renewable energy for electricity requires technology with high power output, fast recharging, long overall life and low cost.
• Aiming to check all of those boxes, a UCLA-led research team has unveiled a hybrid zinc-ion battery that uses 3D printing to store over seven times more energy than current devices like it.
• The researchers also introduced a 3D-printed test cell that improves upon today’s widely used methods for measuring the performance of experimental energy storage devices.

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Energy storage based in zinc instead of lithium would be cheaper and more sustainable because zinc is 100 times more abundant, easier to mine and easier to recycle.

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A lot of charge out of a little terminal
The device in the study is a hybrid technology. One terminal works like the energy-storing part of a traditional lithium-ion battery. The other terminal uses a carbon electrode similar to those in the supercapacitor, a mode of energy storage that holds far less energy but discharges quickly, charges quickly and is expected to last for decades.

Supercapacitors face storage limitations because energy can only be held on the surface of their electrodes. The UCLA-led team achieved a dramatic increase in energy density in two ways: increasing the surface area of their carbon electrode and packing it with vanadium oxide, a material that stores a lot of energy.

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