| Title | A Zinc Battery That Could Compete With Your Favorite Rechargeables | |
| Date | Saturday May 06 2017, @05:59AM | |
| Author | mrpg | |
| Topic | ||
| from the electrifying-news dept. | ||
Original URL: A zinc battery that could compete with your favorite rechargeables
Lithium batteries are currently the belle of the battery ball. They have a lot going for them, including high energy storage for their weight and the ability to charge and recharge many times before losing much capacity.
But we're all familiar with the drawbacks, too. Lithium-ion batteries pose a fire risk, and the lithium and cobalt used in them aren't the most abundant elements, which makes things more expensive.
Plenty of other possible battery chemistries could compete with lithium, but getting them to live up to their theoretical potential is difficult. Zinc, for example, performs admirably in your non-rechargeable alkaline batteries, and it could theoretically make a safer and cheaper rechargeable one—with a water-based electrolyte rather than a flammable organic one. This hasn't happened, though, and the reason becomes apparent if you throw the batteries under a microscope.
Zinc anodes are typically made by binding together particles of zinc powder. Over cycles of charging and recharging, these develop a zinc oxide coating, which is less-conductive and effectively walls off some of the zinc. Branching needles of zinc can also start to grow as a result of this uneven charge distribution. These will eventually pierce through the thin barrier that separates anode from cathode and fatally short-circuit the battery.
A group at the US Naval Research Laboratory has been working on a different way to put together the zinc anode in order to avoid this problem. (The work was funded by a Department of Energy ARPA-E grant—a program the Trump administration has threatened and recently frozen.) In a paper published recently in Science, the team describes how the structure of the zinc anode is more like a sponge, in that the zinc is continuously connected throughout but peppered with tiny pockets of open space. In some ways, it's like a photo-negative of the zinc powder granules.
-- submitted from IRC
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