Despite the media coverage of today's electrochemical devices, it was important to remember that these devices - be they batteries, supercapacitors or even fuel cells - date back over 200 years. Thus, the presentation on the history of batteries outlined the evolution of battery technologies from the volta cell to the Li ion battery and beyond. We mentioned the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the volta battery, which marked the beginning of electricity, and described the battery technologies that followed, namely the Daniell, Becquerel, Leclanché and then Li batteries, specifying for each system their specific chemistry and assembly. The same systematic approach was applied to batteries: lead-acid, Ni-Cd, Ni-MH, Li and Li-ion.
We reported on the performance of each of these batteries, explaining how they work. Initially, they were based on electrodes operating in an aqueous medium, using conversion reactions (lead-acid), then insertion reactions (Ni-Cd and a fortiori Ni-MH, which has two insertion electrodes), before arriving at lithium-ion batteries, whose operating principle combines insertion reactions and non-aqueous electrolytes. The evolution of the latter technology, including its use of nanomaterials, which led to the development of LiFePO4/C or LiCoO2/Si technologies, was described, as was current research into Li-air systems, which are currently attracting a great deal of interest from industry and our institutions due to their theoretical energy density, which is 10 times greater than that of current Li ion technology. With this example, a call for caution was made with regard to the often frequent and far-from-real announcement effects in the battery field.
