From Stanford University encouraging news, a rechargeable Zinc-air battery would put electric cars into the realm of reasonable practicality, where with lead-acid batteries they are currently not.
Stanford scientists develop high-efficiency zinc-air battery
Stanford University scientists have developed an advanced zinc-air battery with higher catalytic activity and durability than similar batteries made with costly platinum and iridium catalysts. The results, published in the May 7 online edition of the journal Nature Communications, could lead to the development of a low-cost alternative to conventional lithium-ion batteries widely used today.
“There have been increasing demands for high-performance, inexpensive and safe batteries for portable electronics, electric vehicles and other energy storage applications,” said Hongjie Dai, a professor chemistry at Stanford and lead author of the study. “Metal-air batteries offer a possible low-cost solution.”
According to Dai, most attention has focused on lithium-ion batteries, despite their limited energy density (energy stored per unit volume), high cost and safety problems. “With ample supply of oxygen from the atmosphere, metal-air batteries have drastically higher theoretical energy density than either traditional aqueous batteries or lithium-ion batteries,” he said. “Among them, zinc-air is technically and economically the most viable option.”
Zinc-air batteries combine atmospheric oxygen and zinc metal in a liquid alkaline electrolyte to generate electricity with a byproduct of zinc oxide. When the process is reversed during recharging, oxygen and zinc metal are regenerated.
“Zinc-air batteries are attractive because of the abundance and low cost of zinc metal, as well as the non-flammable nature of aqueous electrolytes, which make the batteries inherently safe to operate,” Dai said. “Primary (non-rechargeable) zinc-air batteries have been commercialized for medical and telecommunication applications with limited power density. However, it remains a grand challenge to develop electrically rechargeable batteries, with the stumbling blocks being the lack of efficient and robust air catalysts, as well as the limited cycle life of the zinc electrodes.”
Active and durable electrocatalysts on the air electrode are required to catalyze the oxygen-reduction reaction during discharge and the oxygen-evolution reaction during recharge. In zinc-air batteries, both catalytic reactions are sluggish, Dai said.
Recently, his group has developed a number of high-performance electrocatalysts made with non-precious metal oxide or nanocrystals hybridized with carbon nanotubes. These catalysts produced higher catalytic activity and durability in alkaline electrolytes than catalysts made with platinum and other precious metals.
“We found that similar catalysts greatly boosted the performance of zinc-air batteries,” Dai said. both primary and rechargeable. “A combination of a cobalt-oxide hybrid air catalyst for oxygen reduction and a nickel-iron hydroxide hybrid air catalyst for oxygen evolution resulted in a record high-energy efficiency for a zinc-air battery, with a high specific energy density more than twice that of lithium-ion technology.”
The novel battery also demonstrated good reversibility and stability over long charge and discharge cycles over several weeks. “This work could be an important step toward developing practical rechargeable zinc-air batteries, even though other challenges relating to the zinc electrode and electrolyte remain to be solved,” Dai added.
Other authors of the Nature Communications study are Yanguang Li (lead author), Ming Gong, Yongye Liang, Ju Feng, Ji-Eun Kim, Hailiang Wang, Guosong Hong and Bo Zhang of the Stanford Department of Chemistry.
The study was supported by Intel, a Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project exploratory program and a Stinehart/Reed Award from the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy.
This article was written by Mark Shwartz, Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
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Years ago there was a company called Air Energy that developed small non rechargeable batteries using zinc. The company went bankrupt.
This looks interesting because it can be charged..
cool, now wait 20 years for it to get out of the “lab” …
If this is for real, then go long China, Peru & Australia; short Chile, Australia, China & Argentina. Two of the zinc & lithium producers cancel out. Too bad for Bolivia, which just got started mining its salt flats across the border from Chile.
It’s those “other issues that need to be solved” that have killed the last dozen promising battery
technologies. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Stanford to ever produce anything
commercial. These kind of press releases have almost become a standing joke in the battery world.
I’m glad Stanford is doing some real science & engineering instead of pulling the traces of the CACCA band wagon.
and a battery is still a battery………..
When they make one that can deliver 1.21 jiggawatts on demand, I’ll be interested. Until then, I’m holding out for a Mr. Fusion.
@Latitude and a battery is still a battery…
But this one isn’t just a battery. It’s not carrying its own oxidizer, which is the death knell for energy density. If you can use found O2 from the air then you don’t have to carry your oxidizer. That’s a big enough win that it might make sense.
That said, arthur4563 is right that
It’s those “other issues that need to be solved” that have killed the last dozen promising battery
technologies.
A W
“could”,”possibly”,”may”,”challenge”. Looks like the same weasel words that cAGW cultists use. As Latitude said,a battery is a battery. And what is this bit about using carbon in it??
Zinc air has a huge safety advantage over Li, because the energy isn’t there without large amounts of O2. They can’t explode like Li batts can.
On an announcement like this there is an old adage in engineering (pick your field): ” If it don’t make it out of the lab within the next couple of years it never will”. Don’t count your chickens yet. Give it some time.
OldWeirdHarold says:
May 30, 2013 at 2:34 pm
They can’t explode like Li batts can.
________
Dang
Regarding zinc air batteries, from 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE_BalA6AT8
More “prematuris press-releasus”.
Better than Batteries…..
“Forbes magazine,” declared New York Times media reporter David Carr in 2009, “has long been a synonym for riches, success and a belief that business, left to its own devices, will create a better world.” Amid widespread disbelief, Forbes.com is expressing enthusiastic faith in the world-transforming potential of one such device: the “energy catalyzer,” or E-Cat, purported to exploit “low-energy nuclear reactions,” or LENRs, as a gigantic energy-production breakthrough.
In March, Forbes.com publicized two NASA scientists’ LENR enthusiasm. Now it has published the article “Finally! Independent testing of Rossi’s E-Cat cold fusion device: Maybe the world will change after all.” (At least one LENR proponent actually asserts big differences between LENRs and cold fusion.)
A team of Italian and Swedish authors describes this testing in the arXiv paper “Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device containing hydrogen loaded nickel powder.” They write, “Andrea Rossi claims to have invented an apparatus that can produce much more energy per unit weight of fuel than can be obtained from known chemical processes.” They report that their “independent test” took place in December and March experiments. They claim that “energy was produced in decidedly higher quantities than what may be gained from any conventional source.”
“Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device containing hydrogen loaded nickel powder.”
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.3913.pdf
Brant
Photovoltaics technology and battery technology are two fields that are 99% hype and 1% reality. It’s almost not worth reporting any advances when they are announced. Wait until the new technology has proved itself in the marketplace before getting excited about it.
A combination of a cobalt-oxide hybrid air catalyst for oxygen reduction and a nickel-iron hydroxide hybrid air catalyst for oxygen evolution resulted in a record high-energy efficiency for a zinc-air battery, with a high specific energy density more than twice that of lithium-ion technology.
A doubling of specific energy density versus the reigning champion lithium ion technology is really quite an achievement. Doing that with abundant metals (Zinc, Cobalt, Nickel, Iron) and O2 from the air reduces materials and development risks, while offering real economic advantages over more esoteric systems.
I’ve worked a variety of R&D programs in the past, had some ‘losers’… and some ‘winners’. From my perspective, this one is definitely worth putting on the ‘watch list’.
MtK
‘Wouldn’t it be nice . . .’
Apologies to whoever wrote that – a Beach Person [of restricted experience]?
[See, I’m savvy to modern lingo – I think]
Is this really a break-through paper?
Or another ‘I see sunlit uplands ahead (way ahead . . . .)’ job.
I don’t know, but fear the latter.
And I would prefer to warm gradually, rather than what I fear is in store for the globe – namely cooling of some sort.
Auto
Interesting. What progress is being made on hydrogen fuel cell cars?
e-cat LENR is utter Bullsh*t.
Here is a description of what happened when a mass of Uranium accidentally went supercritical, during laboratory testing. No heat burns, just mild warming and lethal doses of radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin
Nuclear fusion, which is what LENR claims, produces around 100 TIMES the amount of damaging neutron radiation as nuclear fission. One of the big unsolved problems with viable nuclear fusion is finding a shielding material which doesn’t crumble into dust from the relentless high energy radiation bombardment.
If there was any nuclear fusion occurring during e-cat demonstrations, enough to produce the claimed “heat anomalies”, the entire demonstration room, and possibly the city block outside, would be flooded with a lethal quantity of high energy radiation.
LENR advocates explanation that this is a “new type of fusion” is utter cr@p. If LENR worked, it would just be a different mechanism for squeezing atomic nuclei together close enough to fuse.
Thankfully it doesn’t work – otherwise their would be a lot of dead gullible people.
Craig Moore says:
May 30, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Thanks for the interesting video! The company in the video, Zinc Air Inc, was set up to commercialize the Lawrence Livermore Lab zinc-air fuel cell technology.
It is no longer working on that technology and has switched to zinc-iron redox flow batteries! Apparently they couldn’t achieve more than 100 charge cycles from the Livermore zinc-air technology.
Erm, EVs on the road today don’t use lead acid batteries. They use various lithium-based chemistry similar to the batteries in your laptop.
For those that haven’t seen this before, here is another battery (aluminum-air) that appears to be on path to a production auto application in 2017.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/151801-aluminium-air-battery-can-power-electric-vehicles-for-1000-miles-will-come-to-production-cars-in-2017
video of test drive
OldWeirdHarold says:
May 30, 2013 at 2:34 pm
Zinc air has a huge safety advantage over Li, because the energy isn’t there without large amounts of O2. They can’t explode like Li batts can.
It probably limits their maximum discharge rate then: not good for traction batteries.
Zinc electrochemistry is prone to the formation of dendrites. There is not much you can do about this.
Dendrite growth during charging causes short circuits as a tree-like tongue of zinc grows out from the zinc electrode until it contacts the other electrode. Its driven by the polarisation layer on the nascent dendrite. As soon as one starts growing it is a self enhancing problem and higher current density causes the zinc to preferentially plate onto the tip of the nascent dendrite. They also are sharply pointed and can pierce right through macroporous membranes.
You can control this for a while but not for very long. I doubt they’ve done real lifetime tests (especially with temperature swings) as these are ‘way too time consuming. “Several weeks” doesn’t cut it.
I am speaking from zinc electrowinning experience, not batteries, but zinc is still zinc.