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posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 04 2016, @04:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the almost-diy-low-tech dept.

After reading lots of nice high-tech ideas on how to improve the lifetime, capacity, and re-charge time of commercial batteries, it was interesting to read an article on how high-performance batteries can be built from scrap metal parts basically in a DIY manner. The targeted use-case is not so much laptops, mobile phones, or cars but rather storing energy from renewable sources like solar- or wind-power.

Take some metal scraps from the junkyard; put them in a glass jar with a common household chemical; and, voilà, you have a high-performance battery.

[...] The secret to unlocking this performance is anodization, a common chemical treatment used to give aluminum a durable and decorative finish. When scraps of steel and brass are anodized using a common household chemical and residential electrical current, the researchers found that the metal surfaces are restructured into nanometer-sized networks of metal oxide that can store and release energy when reacting with a water-based liquid electrolyte.

The team determined that these nanometer domains explain the fast charging behavior that they observed, as well as the battery's exceptional stability. They tested it for 5,000 consecutive charging cycles – the equivalent of over 13 years of daily charging and discharging – and found that it retained more than 90 percent of its capacity.

[...] "We're forging new ground with this project, where a positive outcome is not commercialization, but instead a clear set of instructions that can be addressed to the general public. It's a completely new way of thinking about battery research, and it could bypass the barriers holding back innovation in grid scale energy storage," Pint said.

Especially the last part is highly appealing to me. I'm not expert on the matter whatsoever, so I'm looking forward to reading comments on why this is too good to be true, and which caveats I overlooked. What do you think?


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  • (Score: 2) by gringer on Friday November 04 2016, @07:45PM

    by gringer (962) on Friday November 04 2016, @07:45PM (#422580)

    The paper doesn't actually state what the household chemical is; that information is presumably contained in the supplementary methods.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 04 2016, @08:04PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 04 2016, @08:04PM (#422588) Journal

    They have a list of potential candidates.

    Muriatic acid HCl (diluted from 37%)
    Potassium Hydroxide KOH (1-2M)
    Ammonium Fluoride NH4F (0.05M)
    Ethylene Glycol

    Basically, they've done some tests to prove that the concept might be feasible. They aren't at the production and cost analysis stage yet. Which of those is the "safest" for a layman to work with? I might guess the ethylene glycol, but that has it's own environmentl hazards. Mehhh - it's hard to tell if this will develop into anything important.