On August 30th, at the 79th World Magnesium Congress held in Barcelona, Spain, the International Magnesium Association (IMA) announced that the “Magnesium-ion Battery” project jointly completed by National Engineering Research Center for Magnesium Alloys of Chongqing University, Guangdong Guoyan Science and Technology Research Center, Guangdong Academy of Sciences and relevant cooperators won the 2022 International Future Magnesium Technology award. This award is the only “Future Magnesium Technology award” in the global magnesium industry, Professor Guangsheng Huang gave an online speech as the project award-winning representative. After winning the 2021 International Magnesium Science and Technology Award and the China Shenzhen High-tech Fair Excellent Product Innovation Award, this is the third important award in the field of magnesium batteries won by Academician Fusheng Pan's team, which is a high recognition of Chongqing University's magnesium battery research work and reflects the high expectations of the industry and the market for magnesium energy storage technology under the background of Dual Carbon goals.

As well known, lithium-ion batteries have made significant contributions to the information industry, automotive industry, and contemporary economic development. However, lithium batteries have a shortage of resource, high cost, severe environmental pollution, poor safety, and other problems. Frequent explosions directly affect people's health and safety. Resource shortage seriously affects national resource security and energy security. Magnesium batteries bring many promising properties like only 1/25-50 cost of lithium, high safety, non-dendritic growth, environmental benefits, and equivalent theoretical energy density between magnesium battery and lithium-ion battery equivalent. Therefore, magnesium ion battery is one of the most promising applications for the next generation secondary batteries; magnesium ion battery is considered a potential disruptor of the battery industry. China is rich in magnesium resources and is leading in the research and industry related to magnesium and magnesium alloy. The vigorous development and application of magnesium ion batteries can effectively alleviate the problem of lithium resource shortage; it has vital strategic significance and market value for the development of energy storage industry, information industry, and the upgrading of new energy vehicles.

Chongqing University is the backbone of the International Society for Energy Storage Materials and has the world's largest research team for magnesium batteries and magnesium-based hydrogen storage materials, led by academician Pan Fusheng, with many national talents. The core members of the magnesium battery team include Professor Guangsheng Huang, Professor Jingfeng Wang, Professor Xiaoyuan Zhou, Professor Hongyi Li, Professor Lingjie Li, Professor Yuping Liu, Dr. Chaohe Xu, Dr. Yuan Yuan, Dr. Jinxing Wang, Dr. Liang Wu, Dr. Junyao Xu, Dr. Baihua Qu, and Dr. Jiang Diao. Under the deep care of Chongqing municipal leaders and university leaders, the magnesium battery team of Chongqing University has carried out systematic fundamental studies on critical scientific issues and critical technical research on bottleneck problems. A series of achievements have been made in the fields of cathode materials, anode materials, electrolytes, and equipments; published more than 100 papers closely related to magnesium batteries; successfully developed high-voltage and long-life manganese-based Prussian blue cathode materials, high specific capacity sulfur cathode material, high power vanadium based cathode material, high-performance Mg-RE alloy cathode material, foil processing technology, low cost all inorganic salt based electrolyte, boron-based electrolyte, and others; stayed at the forefront of the international market for main performance indexes. Batch trial production of key materials such as cathode and electrolyte has been successfully achieved; ampere-level magnesium soft pack batteries have been developed; industrialization research and application demonstration has been carried out in cooperation with enterprise partners.

Parts of the products and technologies developed by the “magnesium battery” team of Chongqing University