You won’t be seeing these in your cell phone or even in small off-grid solar installations; but batteries containing wood may someday play a role in large-scale energy storage.
We’ve covered sodium ion batteries in the past – the technology offers an attractive option for low cost grid scale storage as sodium is plentiful.
However, it seems sodium-ion batteries have a short life due to swelling and shrinkage within the battery that occurs during the charge and discharge cycles. As these batteries contain brittle elements, the fluctuations cause the battery to fail after less than a couple of dozen cycles.
Scientists at the University of Maryland have been working on building a better sodium ion battery and may have found the answer in nature.
Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and their team discovered a material consisting of tin coated wood fibers is flexible enough to allow their sodium-ion battery last more than 400 charging cycles.
“Pushing sodium ions through tin anodes often weaken the tin’s connection to its base material,” said Li, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. “But the wood fibers are soft enough to serve as a mechanical buffer, and thus can accommodate tin’s changes. This is the key to our long-lasting sodium-ion batteries.”
A full paper describing the technology is available here.
With the world moving to renewable energy; safe, cheap and clean energy storage is becoming an even more pressing issue.
The following are some of the many novel energy storage technologies we’ve reported on previously, some of which have now been successfully deployed commercially.
– Greener lithium-ion batteries using plants
– Lithium polysulfide
– Sodium-ion
– “Rust” battery
– Zinc air
– Iron phosphate
– Lithium-air
– Virus
– Cavern
– Molten salt
– Beltway
– Flywheel
– Iron based flow
– Vanadium based flow
– Liquid metal
– Silicon air
