A common food and medicine additive has shown it can boost the capacity and longevity of a next-generation flow battery design in a record-setting experiment.
A research team from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reports that the flow battery, a design optimized for electrical grid energy storage, maintained its capacity to store and release energy for more than a year of continuous charge and discharge.
The study, just published in the journal Joule, details the first use of a dissolved simple sugar called β-cyclodextrin, a derivative of starch, to boost battery longevity and capacity. In a series of experiments, the scientists optimized the ratio of chemicals in the system until it achieved 60 percent more peak power.
Then, they cycled the battery over and over for more than a year, only stopping the experiment when the plastic tubing failed. During all that time, the flow battery barely lost any of its activity to recharge. This is the first laboratory-scale flow battery experiment to report more than a year of continuous use with minimal loss of capacity.
It's often the case that technologies developed for racing vehicles trickle down to the wider automotive market. With an endurance race in its sights, a team of more than 30 students at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands has developed a technology that's allowed a 250-km battery pack to be fast-charged in under four minutes.
A few years ago, 10 students from TU/e joined forces to create the InMotion team, with hopes of building a technologically advanced electric racer that could take part in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance competition.
Since then, a number of vehicles have been built – and one or two lap records broken along the way. While developing the recent Revolution prototype, the team managed to get the battery pack to 80% capacity in 12 minutes. But that wasn't fast enough, so InMotion embarked on a two-year quest to significantly reduce plug-in times.
RMIT engineers say they've tripled the energy density of cheap, rechargeable, recyclable proton flow batteries, which can now challenge commercially available lithium-ion batteries for capacity with a specific energy density of 245 Wh/kg.
That's as compared to the ~260-odd Wh/kg delivered by the lithium-ion batteries in a current Tesla Model 3 battery pack, but without using any lithium, thus avoiding a forecasted lithium squeeze, as well as geopolitically sensitive dependence on China in the battery supply chain, and all kinds of end-of-life issues.
We've covered this particular team's work before, way back in 2014, when the first proof of concept of a hydrogen-based proton flow battery was announced.
Essentially, it's a different way of using hydrogen for energy storage. The proton battery works something like a reversible fuel cell, accepting water while charging, splitting out positively-charged hydrogen ions and releasing oxygen.
A collaborative effort between the University of Cordoba and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Germany) is making progress on the design of a solar battery made from an abundant, non-toxic and easily synthesized material composed of 2D carbon nitride. The work is published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
Solar energy is booming. The improvement of solar technology's capacity to capture as much light as possible, convert it into energy and make it available to meet energy needs is key in the ecological transition towards a more sustainable use of energy sources.
In the process between the collection of light by the solar cell and the on-demand use of energy by household appliances, for example, storage plays a crucial role since the availability of solar energy has an inherent intermittency.
To facilitate this storage process and deal with problems such as the environmental impact of the extraction, recycling or scarcity of some of the materials necessary for conventional batteries (such as lithium), the concept of the "solar battery" was born. Solar batteries combine the solar cells that capture light with the storage of its energy in one single device, which then allows the energy to be used when needed.
Alberto Jiménez-Solano, a researcher at the Department of Physics of the University of Cordoba, together with a team from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Stuttgart, Germany), has carried out a study in which he has explored the design characteristics of a solar battery made from a material based on 2D carbon nitride.
"In Professor Bettina V. Lotsch's group, at the Max Planck Institute, they had managed to synthesize a material capable of absorbing light and storing that energy for later use on demand," explains Alberto Jiménez-Solano, "and it occurred to us to use it to create a solar battery."
'Electrified Cement' Could Turn the Foundations of Buildings Into Giant Batteries by David Neld
August 2, 2023
Introduction:
(Science Alert) Scientists are constantly searching for better ways to store renewable energy, and MIT researchers have now found a way to turn cement and an ancient material into a giant supercapacitor.
Potentially, this electrified cement could turn building foundations and roads into almost limitless batteries.
To create the new substance, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University in the US mixed together cement, water and carbon black – a material like a fine charcoal that is created from incomplete combustion processes.
"The material is fascinating, because you have the most-used human made material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material – the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it," says Admir Masic, a materials scientist at MIT.
"You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that's when things get really interesting."
A team of battery researchers led by the University of California San Diego and University of Chicago has developed a new methodology to produce the potentially game-changing thin-film solid-state electrolyte called lithium phosphorus oxynitride (LiPON). The team went on to implement their free-standing version of LiPON film in functional battery tests and found that it promotes a uniformly dense lithium metal electrochemical deposition under zero external pressure, with the aid of internal compressive stress and a gold seeding layer. This work, performed by a team of battery researchers led by the University of California San Diego and University of Chicago, was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on August 03, 2023.
The research team is led by battery researcher and professor Ying Shirley Meng, who is affiliated with both the University of Chicago and UC San Diego. The first author is Diyi Cheng, a recently graduated Ph.D. in the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering who is continuing his research efforts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The team also includes researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Berkeley.
Lithium-ion batteries (LiBs), rechargeable batteries that store energy by leveraging the reversible reduction of Li ions, remain among the most widely used battery technologies worldwide. These batteries power a wide range of devices, ranging from smartphones, headphones and PCs to smart appliances and electric vehicles.
A team of researchers at City University of Hong Kong, Northwestern University, and other institutes in the United States has been trying to devise strategies and solutions that could improve the performance of LiBs, extending their life and increasing their energy capacity. In a recent paper published in Nature Energy, the team introduced a new cathode that could increase the capacity of LiBs, by tackling a well-documented limitation of existing cathodes.
MIT Spinoff Plans Liquid Metal Batteries for Power Grid
Ambri promises lower energy storage costs with batteries that last 20 years.
By Ryan Whitwam August 10, 2023
Governments around the world are investing heavily in renewable energy, but even the most well-considered plans to phase out fossil fuels are missing one crucial ingredient: energy storage. Battery technology is advancing at a snail's pace, as anyone constantly topping up their smartphone can attest. A new startup, which began as an MIT experiment, promises to change that. Ambri says its liquid metal batteries are safe, inexpensive, and perfect for the electrical grid.
Today, most high-capacity batteries use some variation of lithium-ion technology, but these designs rely on rare and expensive materials. The problem is even bigger when you need to power the electrical grid. As a result, MIT estimates the average cost of storing a kilowatt-hour of energy is $405, but that number needs to get closer to $20 to make renewable energy a reality.
CATL launched Shenxing, the world’s first 4C superfast charging LFP battery, capable of delivering 400 km of driving range with a 10-minute charge as well as a range of over 700 km on a single full charge. A 1C charging would mean a full charge in one hour and 4C means a full charge in 15 minutes.
Zinc-air batteries have emerged as a better alternative to lithium in a recent Edith Cowan University (ECU) study into the advancement of sustainable battery systems.
ECU's Dr. Muhammad Rizwan Azhar led the project which discovered lithium-ion batteries, although a popular choice for electric vehicles around the world, face limitations related to cost, finite resources, and safety concerns. The work is published in the journal EcoMat.
"Rechargeable zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are becoming more appealing because of their low cost, environmental friendliness, high theoretical energy density, and inherent safety," Dr. Muhammad Rizwan Azhar said.
"With the emergence of next-generation long-range vehicles and electric aircraft in the market, there is an increasing need for safer, more cost-effective, and high-performance battery systems that can surpass the capabilities of lithium-ion batteries."
