New Type of Battery - Liquid Battery

Solar power is useless without a good way to store electricity on a large scale, in the night. A promising storage option is a new type of battery with all liquid active materials. Prototypes set close, that this liquid batteries as much as the current-day batteries cost less than one-third and could take much longer.

The battery is unlike any other. The electrodes are molten metals and between them is a molten salt electrolyte, who conducts electricity. This results in an unusually robust device, which quickly absorb large quantities of electricity can. The electrodes can on electrical currents "umpteen times higher than all [battery], that which ever observed," to operate, says Donald Sadoway, a material chemistry professor at MIT and one of the inventors of the battery. What's more, the materials are cheap, and the design allows a simple production.

The first prototype consists of a vessel surrounded by insulating material is. The researchers add melted raw materials: antimony on the bottom, an electrolyte such as sodium sulfide in the Middle, and magnesium in the lead. Because every material has a different density, they of course remain in different layers that simplifies production. The container also serves as a pantograph, the provision of electrons from a power supply, such as solar panels or carry away to deliver electricity to power to households and businesses.

As power flows into the battery ,such as ACER UM09E36 battery,ACER UM09E56 battery,ACER UM09E71 battery,ACER 916-2320 battery,ACER 4UR18650F-1-QC192 battery, magnesium and antimony metal are dissolved generated magnesium Antimonide in the electrolyte. If the cell unloads, solve the metals of the two electrodes to form magnesium Antimonide, which solves in the electrolyte, which grow the electrolyte and the electrode to shrink (see above).

Sadoway sees together large cells to a huge battery form wiring. One big enough to meet the peak of electricity demand in New York City for about 13,000 megawatts - fill would almost 60,000 square metres. Solar parks of unprecedented size, load the battery would create not only enough power to daytime electricity needs, but enough surplus energy to the batteries for the night-time operation service price. The first systems are probably save energy during low electricity demand for use in peak generated, thus the need for new power plants and lines.

Many other ways of storing energy from fluctuating sources been proposed, and some brought out limited application. These range from stacks of lead acid batteries for systems, the pump water uphill during the day and it flow back into generators at night spin can be. The liquid battery has the advantage, cheap, durable, and (as opposed to options, such as pumping water) useful in a variety of places. "Nobody was getting able, her arms around the problem of energy storage in large scale for the grid", says Sadoway. "We are literally look at a battery can save the network."

Since the creation of the first prototypes researchers have turned on the metals and salts used, it was not possible, magnesium Antimonide in the electrolyte at high concentrations resolve, so that the first prototypes were too large to be practical. (Sadoway not identify new materials, but says that according to the same principles to work.) The team hopes that a commercial version of the battery will be in five years.