An aluminum-sulfur battery, made from inexpensive, abundant materials, could provide low-cost backup storage for renewable energy sources. As ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems are being built around the world, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup sys
Researchers have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could provide low-cost backup storage for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal. The paper was written by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
The three primary constituents of the battery are: left, aluminum; center, sulfur; and right, rock salt crystals. All are domestically available Earth-abundant materials not requiring a global supply chain. Credit: Rebecca Miller In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius showing 25 times faster rates than 25 °C .
“It’s funny,” he says, because the whole focus was on finding a salt with the lowest melting point, but the catenated chloro-aluminates they ended up with turned out to be resistant to the shorting problem. “If we had started off with trying to prevent dendritic shorting, I’m not sure I would’ve known how to pursue that,” Sadoway says. “I guess it was serendipity for us.”
For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year.
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