Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a sodium-sulfur battery that overcomes one of the most significant barriers to the technology being a commercially viable alternative to the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.
Sodium and Sulphur are more enticing minerals for future battery manufacture because they are less expensive and more generally available than lithium and cobalt, both of which have environmental and human rights implications. As a result, researchers have been working over the past two decades to make sodium-based batteries feasible at ambient temperature.
“I call it a dream technology because sodium and sulfur are abundant, environmentally benign, and the lowest cost you think of,” said Arumugam Manthiram, director of UT’s Texas Materials Institute and professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. “With expanded electrification and increased need for renewable energy storage going forward, cost and affordability will be the single dominant factor.”
The researchers changed the makeup of the electrolyte, the liquid that permits transportation of ions back and forth between the cathode and anode to drive charging and discharging of the batteries, in one of two recent sodium battery advancements from UT Austin.
They tackled the problem of needle-like structures called dendrites growing on the anode of sodium batteries, which can cause the battery to rapidly degrade, short circuit, and even catch fire or explode.
The findings of the researchers were recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
In earlier sodium-sulfur battery electrolytes, the sulfur-based intermediate molecules would dissolve in the liquid electrolyte and travel between the two electrodes within the battery.
Shuttling is a dynamic that can result in material loss, component degradation, and dendrite development.
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