Battery technology under development at MIT could someday make recharging batteries as quick and easy as a trip to the gas station.

Known as semi-solid flow cells, the new battery design turns the chemistry of traditional lithium-ion batteries into quicksand-like tiny particles. The resultant slime — which researchers jokingly call “Cambridge crude” — has an extremely high energy density and is cheaper to manufacture than the innards of a traditional lithium-ion battery. The researchers claim battery cost and size could be cut in half as a result.

That “fuel” offers another advantage: it can be refilled as well as recharged thanks to the new battery’s aqueous-flow structure, in which positive and negative electrodes are solid particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. Instead of plugging in to recharge, you could simply refill the depleted liquid at a refueling station. Are you reading this, Shai Agassi?

Flow batteries have been around for awhile but have used liquids with low energy density, making them too large for practical use in EVs. The new high energy density fluid makes the batteries lighter than lithium-ion counterparts. That could increase the range of the EVs in which they’re installed.

“We’re using two proven technologies, and putting them together,” said materials science professor W. Craig Carter, who led development of the new battery technology along with professor and A123 co-founder Yet-Ming Chiang, undergraduate Mihai Duduta and graduate student Bryan Ho.

Automotive designers will be glad to learn that there are space-saving advantages to the new architecture, too. While a conventional battery combines storage and discharge functions, these new batteries keep the two functions separate. That makes it possible to separate the storage and discharge components, eliminating the need for automakers to design a space-wasting battery storage “tunnel” that’s been a feature of all electric cars to this point.

Development of the technology was partially funded by the Department of Defense. The batteries are licensed to A123 Systems spinoff 24M in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photo: Flickr/LOLren