The battery has been designed to store energy at a temperature over 200°C lower than earlier liquid metal designs, using one electrode made of molten lithium and another of lead and antimony.
With efficiency of about 70%, the battery has capacity to retain 85% of its efficiency following its decade of daily use.
Earlier, the researchers used magnesium and antimony layers to form the battery’s electrodes, which required an operating temperature of 700°C but the new formulation has reduced the temperature to between 450°C and 500°C.
MIT John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry Donald Sadoway said: "We hoped [the characteristics of the two metals] would be nonlinear.
"They proved to be [nonlinear], but beyond our imagination. There was no decline in the voltage. That was a stunner for us."
The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and French energy firm Total have supported the research.
The research team will continue to assess other combinations of metals which can provide even lower-temperature, less costs and higher-performance systems.
Sadoway said: "Now we understand that liquid metals bond in ways that we didn’t understand before."
