Big battery breakthrough

Researchers at an American university have discovered a way of using water to provide a cheap and environmentallyfriendly battery that is also scaleable.

Although at the moment lithiumion batteries are the cutting edge in battery technology, they do have disadvantages, such as: They are relatively expensive. They use rare and toxic materials. They generate heat in operation. They have a relatively short

operational/recharging life. They can only be made in small sizes, so need many to make, for instance, the battery pack in an electric car. However, initial tests of the new technology, developed at the University of Southern California, suggest it overcomes all these problems, and is so scaleable that it could even be used as storage for electricity generated when there is low demand, and then released when there is high demand.

This latter aspect is hugely important as it means power companies won’t need to have generating machinery available just to meet peak demand, and which stands idle for the rest of the time.

One interesting aspect is that the new development – the USC researchers call it an Organic Redox Flow Battery (ORBAT) – contains no metals, unlike conventional batteries.

Instead, there are two tanks containing water-soluble electroactive chemicals called quinones, developed from plant materials. The chemicals are pumped into a cell which contains a membrane, and much the same way as a fuel cell works, electricity is produced.

“Such a battery can be charged and discharged multiple times at high faradaic efficiency without any noticeable degradation of performance,” says the abstract for a paper on the subject published in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society.

“The ORBAT configuration presents a unique opportunity for developing an inexpensive and sustainable metal-free rechargeable battery for large-scale electrical energy storage.”

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