These improvements are unprecedented in battery development, where adjustments to composition typically result in improvements of between 5% and 10%. Extending the lifespan of electric vehicle (EV) batteries would not only reduce the rate at which they end up in landfills or recycling facilities, but would also lessen the environmental pressures associated with nickel and cobalt mining.
However, the pressure must be just right: if it is too high or too low, the batteries will fail. Researchers built a custom device to maintain the pressure on the battery within this "ideal" range, without resorting to any specialized chemical processes. Their results are published in the journal Nature Energy.
In their most basic form, lithium-ion batteries consist of an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. As the battery goes through each charge and discharge cycle, lithium ions move from the anode to the cathode and back again. This causes the battery to physically expand and contract, almost as if it were breathing.

“Batteries don’t generally like this cycle of charging and unloading,” said Professor Michael De Volder of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who co-led the research. “Much of the work to improve lithium-ion batteries is done by chemists and physicists, but as a mechanical engineer, I also wanted to investigate the role that mechanics plays.”

To study this, De Volder and his colleagues built a device that compresses a type of battery known as a “bag cell” using pneumatic “bellows”—tiny air-filled cushions that act like a self-adjusting clamp. The bellows maintain continuous pressure, while a sensor monitors the minute volume changes as the battery is charged and discharged.
“We simply bought commercial batteries and tested their lifespan under different pressures,” De Volder explained. “We didn’t have to change anything in terms of the composition of their electrolyte or their electrodes.”
They discovered that the bellows pressure must be in the "optimal" range: around 12.5 bar, roughly four times the standard pressure of conventional button cells. Outside this range, the batteries fail more quickly. If the pressure is too high, it can cause lithium plates to form on the anode, and if it is too low, it can cause the cathode to crack.

"We found that when the pressure is kept relatively constant throughout each charge and discharge cycle, the overall battery life is significantly improved," explained De Volder. "If it's pressed too hard, the anode is negatively affected. If it's not pressed enough, the cathode begins to degrade. Our experiments identified the 'sweet spot' for batteries with regard to pressure."

The results, although in their early stages, could have important implications for the rapidly growing electric vehicle market, particularly the used car market. “The longer the product lasts, the fewer times the materials will need to be recycled,” De Volder said. “And, at the moment, we’re very bad at recycling batteries.”
Furthermore, longer-lasting electric vehicle batteries could reduce the volume of raw materials that need to be extracted—often under extremely precarious conditions—to manufacture new batteries. “We’ve developed a solution for cleaner electric cars, but we need to make sure that, in return, we aren’t causing new ecological disasters in other parts of the world,” De Volder said. “If we could reduce the pressure on these mining operations a little, that would be another major benefit.”
The technology has been tested at laboratory scale but will need to be scaled up for commercial battery applications. Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s innovation arm, has applied for a patent.

The research has been partially supported by the European Research Council, the Faraday Institution, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Michael De Volder is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Heng Wang, Rui Wang et al. The interaction between cell pressure, mechanical expansion, and degradation pathways in NMC-graphite lithium-ion batteries. Nature Energy (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-026-02087-6