Posted on 10/23/2024 5:50:34 AM PDT by Red Badger
A WPI research team has improved iron-based alkaline batteries by adding silicate, preventing hydrogen gas formation during charging.
The world is swiftly shifting toward renewable energy, but challenges remain. Solar power is unavailable at night, and wind energy fluctuates unpredictably. To address these gaps, new technologies are needed to store excess energy from the grid when production is high and release it during times of shortage.
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries play a crucial role in everyday life, powering devices from smartphones to electric vehicles. However, they rely on limited resources like lithium, nickel, and cobalt, raising concerns about sustainability and cost.
Xiaowei Teng, the James H. Manning Professor in Chemical Engineering at WPI, is leading a team to explore new battery technologies for grid energy storage. The team’s recent results, published in the European scientific journal ChemSusChem, suggest that iron, when treated with the electrolyte additive silicate, could create a high-performance alkaline battery anode.
The second most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust after aluminum, iron is far more sustainable than nickel and cobalt. The United States alone recycles approximately over 40 million metric tons of iron and steel from scrap each year.
Teng notes that iron is already used as an alkaline battery anode in iron-nickel alkaline batteries—invented by Thomas Edison in the 1900s—but it has low energy efficiency and storage capacity due to the formation of hydrogen gas during charging and inert iron oxide during discharging.
The Role of Silicate in Iron Alkaline Batteries
“You don’t want hydrogen gas formation when charging a battery,” said Teng. “It impairs the energy efficiency of the battery system considerably. Without addressing these technical challenges, iron alkaline batteries are less attractive for modern energy storage systems to be coupled with electric grids.”
In an Oct. 7 cover story featured in ChemSusChem, the team reported that adding silicate to the electrolytes allowed them to charge a battery without producing hydrogen.
A chemical compound of silicon and oxygen, silicate has long been used as an inexpensive and simple agent in glass, cement, insulation, and detergents, said Sathya Jagadeesan, a PhD student at WPI and lead author on the paper. The team discovered that silicate also strongly interacts with battery electrodes and suppresses hydrogen gas generation. Teng said this new process could improve the alkaline iron redox chemistries in iron-air and iron-nickel batteries for energy storage applications, such as microgrids or individual solar or wind farms.
Reference:
“Unlocking High Capacity and Reversible Alkaline Iron Redox Using Silicate-Sodium Hydroxide Hybrid Electrolytes”
by Sathya Narayanan Jagadeesan, Fenghua Guo, Ranga Teja Pidathala, A. M. Milinda Abeykoon, Gihan Kwon, Daniel Olds, Badri Narayanan and Xiaowei Teng, 19 June 2024, ChemSusChem.
DOI: 10.1002/cssc.202400050
Available in as little as 10 years! While supplies last...
Imagine the old workhorse ALKALINE battery now becomes rechargeable!
Duracell, Rayovac, Eveready, Energizer, et al, might all go out of business!..............
Materials science is one of the lessor known (to the general public) but often most important areas of science.
It’s magic! chuckle
Silica is already top notch anode material for lithium and sodium ions, no reason to think it couldn’t hold Fe2+/3+ ions. Once you use nanoglass semi-solid or solid electrolytes to stop polysulfides from forming you can use sulfur as the cathode tripling energy density, with no need for cobalt,nickel or manganese at all.
“One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.” - Robert Heinlein...................
Worth repeating. The modern world would not exist w/o the energy density of lithium ion tech. Smartphones ,tablets, laptops,drones,medical devices, robot anything. Simply cannot exist without lithium ion tech or more accurately 200+wh/kg energy density. That is the enabling factor. Nickel cadmium nor nickel metal hydride has the energy density for these things. Even without EVs third and fourth generation ion cells will be coming to market it’s a trillion dollar market for power cells. Lithium has had 30 years of development since they where invented by UT Austin. With AI able to test millions of chemicals and crystalline structures in hours what would take humans years to randomly select it won’t be 10 years or even 5 till next gen cells come to market. Case in point sodium ion went from lab bench to in low cost Chinese EVs in under 5 years with energy density equal to lithium Iron phosphates which itself is under ten years old. Lithium sulfur is in small batch production already, same for aluminum graphene. The world is based on power cells and the market is hot, university of Queensland solved the $1000kg graphene problem they commercialized natural gas to graphene in bulk quantities cheap enough to make cells for the U.S. DOD once it’s released to the general public AlGr cells have triple density vs lithium and take tens of thousands of cycles with 60+C charge rates. It’s little wonder the military is going to put them in drones they are superior to every other battery tech on the planet. It’s not if it’s when at this point.
"Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat" - Bulwinkle
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ~ Arthur C. Clarke
What was his BATtery average?...................
What was his BATtery average?...................
With all the AMAZING battery BREAKTHROUGHs the past 20 years, they should be paying us to take their batteries, batteries should have higher energy storage than uranium, be made by elf labor at the North Pole, and be never catch on fire.
Here is another Iron based chemistry on the cathode side vs the anode. It’s one or two percent as expensive as nickel cobalt manganese cathodes with as high or higher energy density. Lithium is not rare contrary to what the luddies want to pearl clutch too. The Midland basin is loaded with lithium every shale well flows large amounts of it in the produced salt waters. One well makes in a week enough lithium for hundreds of EV packs. There is over 100,000 wells in the Midland basin every one of this has produced water available. Then there is SWD injections wells that have 40 years of stored produced water in them they could be reversed strip the lithium and inject the water right back down dip. There is billions of bbls of water down there. The avg produced water to oil ratio is 6:1 water to oil. In reality the lithium in the flow back water is worth more than the oil that comes up with it. Lithium also doesn’t get burnt to the sky it can be recycled just like aluminum. Mine once use many is what every geologist knows from university.
I worked on this project with a major producer in the Eagle Ford. Then as a consultant in Midland with SWD drinkers and operators plus UT Austin as a geologist for operations and exploration. One of my masters is in hydrogeology.
"Silicate Magic" certainly fits in there.
Lithium ion is only 30 years old, it has doubled in energy density in that time. The next gen of cells already triples what took 30 years of dev to do. AI modeling and simulation is the difference. Sodium ion is the text book example. It was thought to be impossible to have room temp sodium cells. China’s CATL the largest battery manufacture in the world took them from the lab bench less than 5 years ago into mass production and in sub $10000 electric vehicles this year. These cells have the same energy density as LFP cells which are 3rd gen lithium ion cells. LFP cells themselves are second generation lithium. Iron chloride will take over for LFP it’s cheaper and has more capacity than phosphates.
Seems to me that Titanium would make an excellent battery material................
I used to use transmutation doped silicon.
Transmutation, there’s the goal of alchemists turned into an industrial process...
Not major just solid chemistry and materials science. Silicate is just silicon oxides. Otherwise know as sand in it’s SiO4 form. Silica is available in unlimited amounts....
“The mass of Earth’s crust is 59 percent silica, the main constituent of more than 95 percent of the known rocks.”
Silica based anodes are already in a number of commercial batteries with more on the way. Silica has triple the capacity vs carbon with lattice structure for lithium,sodium, calcium and magnesium , Iron is also being looked at since it’s 2+/3+ in electron shells.
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