By Battery Energy On-line Employees
June 27, 2023 | John B. Goodenough, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for growing the lithium-ion battery, died on Sunday, June 25, 2023. He was 100. The College of Texas at Austin, the place Dr. Goodenough was a professor of engineering, introduced his loss of life, calling him a “devoted public servant, a sought-after mentor and a superb but humble inventor.”
Born in 1922 in Germany, Goodenough grew up within the northeastern United States and attended the Groton Faculty in Massachusetts. In 1944, he earned a bachelor’s diploma in arithmetic from Yale College. After serving as a meteorologist within the U.S. Military, Goodenough returned to finish a grasp’s diploma and Ph.D., in 1952, each in physics from the College of Chicago. On the College of Chicago, he studied below Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and John A. Simpson, each of whom labored on the Manhattan Mission. His doctoral adviser was famend physicist Clarence Zener.
Goodenough started his profession on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how’s Lincoln Laboratory in 1952, the place he labored for twenty-four years and laid the groundwork for the event of random-access reminiscence (RAM) for the digital pc. He emerged as a pioneer of orbital physics and one of many founders of the trendy concept of magnetism, which turned often known as the Goodenough-Kanamori Guidelines. These guidelines present a sensible steering within the analysis of magnetic supplies and have a huge effect in growing gadgets in telecommunications.
After MIT, Goodenough turned a professor and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory on the College of Oxford. Right here, he recognized and developed the important cathode supplies that offered the high-energy density wanted to energy electronics equivalent to cellphones, laptops and tablets, in addition to electrical and hybrid automobiles. In 1979, he and his analysis crew discovered that through the use of lithium cobalt oxide because the cathode of a lithium-ion rechargeable battery, it will be doable to realize a excessive density of saved power with an anode aside from metallic lithium. This discovery led to the event of carbon-based supplies that permit for using secure and manageable destructive electrodes in lithium-ion batteries.
He moved to UT Austin in 1986. In 1991, Sony Corp. commercialized the lithium-ion battery, for which Goodenough offered the inspiration for a prototype. In 1996, a safer and extra environmentally pleasant cathode materials was found in his analysis group, and, in 2020, a Canadian hydroelectric energy firm acquired the patents for this newest battery.
Goodenough’s fast wit and infectious snigger have been defining traits, in keeping with the College of Texas obituary. “That snigger might be heard reverberating by UT engineering buildings — you knew when Goodenough was in your flooring, and also you couldn’t assist however smile on the considered working into him,” the authors wrote.
“He was nonetheless coming into work properly into his 90s. For him, there was no motive to not,” they continued. “Don’t retire too early!’ Goodenough informed the Nobel Basis and others. It was recommendation he continuously gave and definitely adopted.”
Along with the Nobel Prize—which he was awarded collectively with Stanley Whittingham of the State College of New York at Binghamton and Akira Yoshino of Meijo College—Goodenough was the recipient of the Nationwide Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Robert A. Welch Award, the Copley Medal and lots of others. He authored a number of books, together with an autobiography titled “Witness to Grace,” revealed in 2008. Goodenough and his spouse have been married for over 70 years till her loss of life in 2016. That they had no youngsters.