Volume 95, Issue 11

The aim of this paper is to provide a historical and scientific overview of the battery world, from the disrupting discovery of Alessandro Volta to the latest advances in lithium ion batteries. For sake of clarity, it has been divided into three parts: the past, the present and the future. The first part illustrates the historical path which led to the lithium ion batteries. The second part reports the main challenges to the Li ion batteries that have been and still must be faced for increasing their performance and their sustainability. In the last part, considerations about the future of lithium ion batteries are discussed, with a special focus on sustainability.

Alessandro Volta built his pile in the winter of 1799 in his country house with no lab and no technical staff because, due to the war against Napoleon, the Austrians had closed the University of Pavia and fired the professors. Volta sent the article on the pile to the Royal Society in March 1800, and through the long process of publication in the journal Philosophical Transactions (September 1800), the news spread through the London scientific community. The physician Anthony Carlisle and the chemist and editor William Nicholson were the first to build a battery and used it to decompose water. The great news that electricity could be generated by a simple and easily constructed device was also printed in the daily newspapers, which helped to spread the word throughout Europe and inspired scientists and practitioners to build their own pile and carry out the electrical decomposition of various electrolytes, thus creating the basis for the new discipline of electrochemistry.

Recently, the scope, regulation, legislation, and metrology of the analytical chemistry of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) have been reviewed in the Part 1 of the IUPAC Technical Report. Chemical analysis of nanomaterials in complex sample matrices presents a substantial challenge for analytical science and regulatory agencies. The purpose of the present Part 2 is to discuss the detection, characterization, and quantification of nanomaterials in samples of complex matrices including methods for sample preparation and fitness for purpose. Analytical methods applied to analysis in matrices of environmental samples, food, cosmetics, and biological samples as well as those used to monitor the fate of ENMs in the environment and biological systems are reported. Tables of numerous recently published works on analyses of typical ENMs with detailed protocols and conclusive comments are presented. There is a rapid development in the field mostly in the stage of accumulation of factual material. The single-particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry is already widely used at the chemical analysis of metal-containing nanoparticles.