Sodium Sulfur Battery
Sodium-sulfur battery – There is great expectation that sodium batteries will replace lithium batteries, especially after a solid sodium battery has surpassed 1000 charge and discharge cycles.
However, it is still unclear which of the existing options will win the race to market – as with lithium-based batteries, sodium-based batteries come in different flavors, such as sodium ion, solid state sodium batteries, batteries sodium-air and sodium-sulfur batteries.
Now, Bin-Wei Zhang and colleagues from the University of Sydney, in Australia, have achieved an important milestone precisely in this last option, sodium-sulfur batteries.
Using a simple pyrolysis process and carbon-based electrodes to improve sulfur reactivity and the reversibility of reactions between sulfur and sodium, the prototype exhibited record energy density and an ultra-long lifetime at room temperature.
“Our sodium battery has the potential to dramatically reduce costs by providing four times more storage capacity. This is a significant advance for the development of renewable energy that, while lowering long-term costs, presents several financial barriers to entry, ” said Professor Shenlong Zhao, coordinator of the team.
Low cost battery
Although the first sodium-sulfur (Na-S) batteries were developed more Fifty years ago, they have been considered a less promising alternative due to a low energy capacity and few life cycles (charging/discharging).
But improving them could be worth it because sodium sulfur is a type of molten salt that can be processed from seawater, costing much less to produce than lithium.
The researchers say their Na-S battery now also represents a more energy-dense and less toxic alternative to lithium-ion batteries, which, while used extensively in electronic devices and for energy storage, are very expensive.
The results were so promising that the team is already talking about commercialization, with work already underway to move from “button battery” scale prototypes to aluminum-encapsulated cells, commercially used to manufacture various models of batteries.
