A research team says it has found a way to make lithium and silicon batteries charge in about the time it takes to buy a snack, without torching the cell in the process. The method, developed by scientists at the University of Adelaide and Imperial College London, uses a surface treatment on the anode rather than tinkering with the entire battery chemistry, and the payoff is eye-catching: up to 85% charge in 6 minutes.
That kind of speed still won’t make plugging in identical to filling a tank, but it narrows the gap enough to matter for EV charging. Fast charging has long run into the same wall: heat, faster degradation, and battery fade. The new approach tries to sidestep those trade-offs by controlling reactions right where they happen, at the interface, instead of pushing the whole system harder and hoping for the best.
What the new anode coating does
Led by Professor Shi-Zhang Qiao, the group created catalytic sites on the anode surface that attract anions during charging. That encourages a dense inorganic protective layer, known as SEI, enriched with lithium fluoride, to form quickly and in a more stable way. The clever bit is that this layer also develops tiny channels that help lithium ions move faster, which is how the battery can take high charging current without falling apart internally.
There’s a useful lesson here for the EV industry: the old instinct was to redesign the whole battery to survive faster charging, which often damaged ion transport. This work follows the more surgical route, and that’s usually where the real gains show up first.
Six-minute EV charging results
- 85% charge in 6 minutes
- 91.4% charge in about 10 minutes
- 240.4 Wh/kg specific energy
- 99.94% coulombic efficiency for the upgraded silicon anode
- About 76% of initial capacity after 500 cycles of six-minute ultra-fast charging
Those figures matter because ultra-fast charging usually forces a trade-off between speed and battery life. If these results hold outside the lab, they would put pressure on rivals working on the same problem through electrolyte tweaks, thermal management, or entirely new cell chemistries. For automakers, that could mean fewer excuses for making drivers wait longer than they do at a petrol station.
From lab cell to full battery pack
The team is now moving toward scale-up and tests in full-size battery modules under real operating conditions. That’s the awkward part, because a result that looks brilliant in a controlled cell can get messy once you add automotive temperature swings, packaging constraints, and cost targets. Still, the direction is obvious: if the coating works at scale, EV charging stops being a patience test and starts looking a lot more like a quick stop.
The wider race is already on. Carmakers and battery suppliers from China to Europe have been chasing ultra-fast charging hardware, but many approaches still lean on expensive cells or very specific charging conditions. A surface-level fix that preserves energy density would be a much cleaner answer, and cleaner answers tend to travel faster from papers to production.