Send this article to a friend:

September
17
2018

MIT discovery resurrects potential of molten salt batteries for grid level power storage
Loz Blain


A new steel-based membrane could ressurect a 50-year-old battery technology, leading to cheap grid-level power storage and an increase in renewable energy use. (Credit: Illustration to the right modified from an original image by Felice Frankel)

One of the primary problems with renewable energy, particularly wind and solar, is that power gets generated when the wind or sun is available, rather than when it's most needed. This problem would more or less disappear if the world could come up with a massive, cheap, long-lasting battery design that could be used to store power at grid-scale levels and feed it back out when required.

Lithium batteries are the current darlings (heh heh) of the electric vehicle and consumer electronics industries, due to their high performance, power density and light weight. But lithium is way too expensive a material for grid-scale storage, and when you're talking about making batteries for a whole city, size and weight are far less important than making something super cheap, safe and reliable that will last for as long as possible. All the better if it can be made out of common and easily available materials.

Good news, then, from MIT on this front, as a team of researchers has found a cheap, effective and durable way of resurrecting an old battery idea first documented 50 years ago.

The discovery centers around molten salt batteries such as sodium/sulfur or sodium/nickel chloride designs in which electrodes are kept at high temperatures to keep them in a molten state and allow charge to transfer between them.

Typically, the electrodes need to be kept separate by a special type of membrane that allows certain molecules through and keeps others separate. This has been successfully done in the past with a thin beta-alumina ceramic layer, but commercial use of these batteries has been limited by how fragile and brittle this ceramic layer is, and its tendency to shatter. Not the kind of thing you want to bet your city's power supply on.

The MIT team has discovered a different way of separating the electrodes, using a regular steel mesh coated with titanium nitride. Where the ceramic layer sorts molecules according to their physical size, using the size of holes in the porous ceramic material, the steel mesh uses its electrical properties instead to achieve the same result. And it's much more durable.

The steel mesh technique is applicable to a number of different molten-electrode battery chemistries, and while it doesn't help with small, lightweight battery designs like you'd see in an electric car or mobile phone, the researchers believe it could be a game changer for large-scale, low-cost, fixed-location energy storage.

Such an advance could allow cities to safely and easily ramp up the amount of renewables in its energy mix – and that's good news for everyone.

Source: MIT

 

 


 

 

Loz has been one of our most versatile contributors since 2007. Joining the team as a motorcycle specialist, he has since covered everything from medical and military technology to aeronautics, music gear and historical artefacts. Since 2010 he's branched out into photography, video and audio production, and he remains the only New Atlas contributor willing to put his name to a sex toy review. A singer by night, he's often on the road with his acappella band Suade.


 

 

 

newatlas.com

[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com] [Most Recent USD from www.kitco.com] [Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]

Send this article to a friend: