Research on next-generation "lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery" has a long way to go

Batteries already power a wide range of electronics, gadgets, and even cars. Even cleaner, more convenient batteries could help keep the entire power grid running in the near future. As wind and solar power take off, energy companies are looking for ways to keep electrons flowing when the sun isn't shining and the wind is ebbing. The first giant devices to come to scientists' attention are lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery, energy storage devices that use electrolyzers that can store enough electricity to power thousands of homes for hours at a time. But most lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery rely on vanadium, a rare and expensive metal, and alternatives to this metal are short-lived and toxic.

Last week, researchers reported that their potentially cheap, long-lived, and safe lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery overcome many of these shortcomings. The work is part of a series of advances that give rise to optimism that a new generation of lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery will soon be the backbone of large-scale deployment of wind and solar power. "There's a lot of progress in this area right now," says Ulrich Schubert, a chemist at the University of Jena in Germany.

Lithium-ion batteries, especially those used in laptops and Teslas, are the current leaders in grid-scale applications. Already, they provide backup power for hospitals, office parks and even towns. But they don’t scale well to the larger sizes needed to provide backup power for cities, says Michael Perry, associate director of electrochemical energy systems at the United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, Connecticut.

That’s where lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery come in. They store charge in tanks of liquid electrolytes that are pumped through electrodes to extract electrons, with the spent electrolyte returned to the tanks. When solar panels or turbines provide electrons, pumps push the spent electrolyte back to the electrodes, where it recharges and returns to the tanks. Scaling up the batteries to store more power simply requires bigger electrolyzers. Vanadium has become a popular electrolyte component because the metal can reliably charge and discharge over thousands of cycles. Rongke Power in Dalian, China, for example, is building the world’s largest vanadium flow battery, which will come online in 2020. The battery will store 800 megawatt-hours of energy, enough to power thousands of homes. The market for lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery, led by vanadium batteries and zinc-bromine, another variety, is likely to grow by nearly $1 billion a year over the next five years, according to market research firm MarketsandMarkets.

But vanadium prices have risen in recent years, and experts worry that if demand for the metal surges, so too will prices. “One major alternative is to replace vanadium with organic compounds, which can be precisely tailored to meet the designer’s needs,” says Tianbiao Liu, a flow battery expert at Utah State University. But organics tend to degrade and need replacement after a few months, and some compounds work only with strong acidic or alkaline electrolytes, which can damage pumps and potentially cause tanks to leak, which is very dangerous.

Researchers are now in the midst of a “second wave of progress” in organic lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery, Schubert says. In July, a team led by Harvard University materials scientist Michael Aziz reported in the journal Joule that they had developed a long-lived organic molecule that loses only 3% of its charge-carrying capacity each year. That’s still not stable enough, but it’s very low compared with previous organic lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery, Liu says.

Iron ions, which are cheap and efficient, are another promising alternative. A company called EES in Portland, Oregon, is selling such batteries, for example. But EES's batteries need to operate in electrolytes with a pH between 1 and 4.

Now, Liu and his colleagues have come up with a flow battery that operates at neutral pH. They started with an iron-containing electrolyte called ferrocyanide that they have studied in the past. But in previous ferrocyanide batteries, the electrolyte is dissolved in water containing sodium or potassium salts, which provide positively charged ions that move around the battery to balance the movement of electrons during charging and discharging. Ferrocyanide doesn't dissolve well in these salt solutions, which greatly limits the battery's electrochemical storage capacity.

So Liu and his colleagues replaced the salt with a nitrogen-based compound called ammonium, which allows ferrocyanide to dissolve at least twice as much, doubling the battery's capacity. The resulting battery is not as energy-dense as a vanadium flow battery. But in last week’s issue of Joule, Liu and his colleagues reported that their iron-based organic flow battery showed no signs of degradation after 1,000 charge-discharge cycles, the equivalent of three years of stable operation. And because the electrolyte is water-based, leaks are unlikely to cause environmental damage.

“Overall, this is an excellent piece of work,” says Qing Wang, a materials scientist at the National University of Singapore, who cautions that the battery is sluggish in both charging and discharging. Liu and his colleagues are planning to test other electrolyte additives to boost conductivity.

It’s too early to say which flow battery electrochemistry will support the renewable grid of the future. Another contender uses electrolytes made from metal-containing organic compounds called polyoxometalates, which store far more energy per volume than rivals. In the 10 October issue of Nature Chemistry, for example, researchers led by chemist Leroy Cronin at the University of Glasgow, UK, reported a polyoxometalate flow battery that can store 40 times more charge than an equivalent vanadium battery. The current drawback is that these electrolytes are highly viscous, making pumping the battery more challenging, Cronin said. "Today, there is still no one flow battery that meets all needs, which means there is still plenty of room for development research in lithium 3400mah 3.7v 18650 battery," Schubert said.

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