Akira Yoshino
Akira Yoshino made the lithium-ion battery practical and shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. Born in Suita, Osaka in 1948, he became interested in chemistry at primary school when a teacher recommended Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle, and studied engineering at Kyoto University, taking his doctorate much later, at fifty-six. He joined the Asahi Kasei corporation in 1972 and spent his career there. The problem was that rechargeable batteries using lithium metal at the anode were dangerous. Lithium is the lightest metal and gives the highest energy density, but repeated charging grows dendrites — needle-like deposits — which pierce the separator, short the cell and cause fires. John Goodenough had shown in 1980 that lithium cobalt oxide worked as a cathode; Stanley Whittingham had built the first lithium battery in the 1970s. Yoshino's contribution in 1985 was the anode. He used petroleum coke, a form of carbon with the right crystalline structure to hold lithium ions between its layers rather than plating them as metal, which removed the dendrite problem entirely. He then made the cell manufacturable: an aluminium current collector, a porous polyethylene separator that melts and shuts the cell down if it overheats, and a safety valve. Sony commercialised it in 1991. The result is the power source for every mobile phone, laptop and electric vehicle, and the reason portable electronics exist in their present form. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize with Goodenough and Whittingham, and works on energy storage for renewables. He was sixty-seven before the work was widely recognised outside the industry.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: chemist, inventor
