by Sophie Vorrath |
Researchers at Perth's Murdoch University have developed a water-based sodium-ion battery that they say shows "excellent potential" to solve one of the renewable energy industry’s greatest challenges: cheap and reliable power storage for intermittent resources like wind and solar.
“To provide power at non-generation times, excess energy needs to be stored in batteries, but storage technologies now being considered, such as molten salt or molten sulfur, work at high temperatures, making them expensive and impractical,” said Senior research fellow and project leader Dr Manickam Minakshi. “Our water-based sodium-ion battery has shown excellent potential for affordable, low-temperature storage.”
The team from Murdoch’s School of Chemical and Mathematical Sciences tested various metals and phosphates to produce a cost-effective battery with high energy density made from manganese dioxide and a novel olivine sodium phosphate.
Dr Minakshi says sodium appealed as a key ingredient because, while its chemical properties are similar to lithium, it's a good deal cheaper and far more abundantly available. The main challenge it presented, he says, was to find material for cathodes and anodes capable of accommodating sodium’s ionic size, which is 2.5 times larger than that of lithium.
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