by Nick Chambers

With a theoretical storage capacity more than 10 times higher than today’s best lithium-ion batteries, it’s no wonder lithium-air batteries are being touted as one of the types of batteries that could make electric cars truly mainstream.

Now, as part of a US Department of Energy program to provide large amounts of supercomputer time to advance cutting edge, real world research, IBM scientists are partnering with government scientists from both Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to model and develop the materials needed to make lithium-air batteries a reality.

The award provides up to 24 million hours of computer time on two of the world’s fastest supercomputers–which, you guessed it, are housed at the two national labs. To give you some perspective, this only represents about 1.5% of the total time available on both computers, but considering how many other scientists use these computers, the fact that one project got 1.5% of the total time is pretty amazing.

IBM has been researching lithium-air batteries for some time. In the past they’ve indicated they’re not interested in building their own batteries, but want to partner with other players. The major stumbling blocks to building a consumer grade lithium-air battery have thus far been related to safety and recharging. Lithium can be extremely flammable and using air as a reactant instead of forms of cobalt or iron greatly increases the danger for the battery to catch fire.

The researchers hope that with the huge amount of computing time made available to them, they’ll be able to develop materials and methods to deal with some of these issues.

Given that recent reports clearly show lithium-ion batteries are coming up far too short in certain areas, the world can’t get next generation batteries soon enough.