Doctoral students Billy McCulloch (left) and Mingzhe Yu (right) of The Ohio State University with a prototype of the new aqueous solar flow battery.
CREDIT
Image by Kevin Fitzsimons, courtesy of The Ohio State University.
Sunlight makes the new ‘aqueous solar flow’ battery 20 percent more efficient than today’s lithium-iodine batteries
After debuting the world’s first solar air battery last fall, researchers at The Ohio State University have now reached a new milestone.
In the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they report that their patent-pending design–which combines a solar cell and a battery into a single device–now achieves a 20 percent energy savings over traditional lithium-iodine batteries.
The 20 percent comes from sunlight, which is captured by a unique solar panel on top of the battery, explained Yiying Wu, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.
The solar panel is now a solid sheet, rather than a mesh as in the previous design. Another key difference comes from the use of a water-based electrolyte inside the battery.
Because water circulates inside it, the new design belongs to an emerging class of batteries called aqueous flow batteries.
“The truly important innovation here is that we’ve successfully demonstrated aqueous flow inside our solar battery,” Wu said.
As such, it is the first aqueous flow battery with solar capability. Or, as Wu and his team have dubbed it, the first “aqueous solar flow battery.”
“It’s also totally compatible with current battery technology, very easy to integrate with existing technology, environmentally friendly and easy to maintain,” he added.
Researchers around the world are working to develop aqueous flow batteries because they could theoretically provide affordable power grid-level energy storage someday.
The solar flow battery could thus bridge a gap between today’s energy grid and sources of renewable energy.
“This solar flow battery design can potentially be applied for grid-scale solar energy conversion and storage, as well as producing ‘electrolyte fuels’ that might be used to power future electric vehicles,” said Mingzhe Yu, lead author of the paper and a doctoral student at Ohio State.
Previously, Yu designed the solar panel out of titanium mesh, so that air could pass through to the battery. But the new aqueous flow battery doesn’t need air to function, so the solar panel is now a solid sheet.
The solar panel is called a dye-sensitized solar cell, because the researchers use a red dye to tune the wavelength of light it captures and converts to electrons. Those electrons then supplement the voltage stored in the lithium-anode portion of the solar battery.
Something has to carry electrons from the solar cell into the battery, however, and that’s where the electrolyte comes in. A liquid electrolyte is typically part salt, part solvent; previously, the researchers used the salt lithium perchlorate mixed with the organic solvent dimethyl sulfoxide. Now they are using lithium iodide as the salt, and water as the solvent. (Water is an inorganic solvent, and an eco-friendly one. And lithium iodide offers a high-energy storage capacity with low cost.)
In tests, the researchers compared the solar flow battery’s performance to that of a typical lithium-iodine battery. They charged and discharged the batteries 25 times. Each time, both batteries discharged around 3.3 volts.
The difference was that the solar flow battery could produce the same output with less charging. The typical battery had to be charged to 3.6 volts to discharge 3.3 volts. The solar flow battery was charged to only 2.9 volts, because the solar panel made up the difference. That’s an energy savings of nearly 20 percent.
The project is still ongoing, and the solar flow design will undoubtedly evolve again as the researchers try to make the battery more efficient.
Read more:Â New design brings world’s first solar battery to performance milestone
The Latest on: Aqueous solar flow battery
via Google News
The Latest on: Aqueous solar flow battery
- Rising to meet its potential: flow batteries part in the storage storyon May 11, 2022 at 6:51 am
Combining high performance characteristics and safety with lower levelised-cost-of-storage, flow batteries are the perfect choice for long-duration energy ...
- Vanadium Redox Battery Market Size: Industry Development Scenario and Forecast 2022-2031on May 4, 2022 at 10:03 am
Japan, Japan, Wed, 04 May 2022 08:15:49 / Comserve Inc. / -- Vanadium Redox Battery Market With Top Countries ... of renewable energy generators (solar panels and wind turbines) and the continuous ...
- Vanadium Redox Battery Market Size: Industry Development Scenario And Forecast 2022-2031on May 4, 2022 at 9:20 am
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, Japan, May 04, 2022, 08:15 /Comserve / -- Vanadium Redox Battery Market With Top ... of renewable energy generators (solar panels and wind turbines) and the continuous ...
- New Energy Storage Tech Challenges Lithium Batteries but at What Cost?on May 3, 2022 at 5:00 pm
Storage for this length of time is far better than conventional batteries and will help wind and solar energy sources to dominate ... One of the benefits of aqueous sulfur flow batteries is their ...
- Dual membrane offers hope for long-term energy storageon May 3, 2022 at 1:22 pm
renewable sources such as wind and solar. The research is published in Nature Communications. In redox flow batteries, energy is stored in liquid electrolytes which flow through the cells during ...
- Internship | Development of Novel Redox Flow Batteries for Large-Scale Energy Ston January 20, 2022 at 5:20 am
The intermittency of the renewable energy resources such as solar and wind ... simultaneously. Aqueous rechargeable batteries have favorable characteristics of low cost, high safety and environmental ...
- Go with the flow batterieson December 10, 2017 at 11:21 am
Flow batteries are therefore attractive as a potential means for regulating the output of intermittent sources of electricity such as wind or solar power ... Huskinson and colleagues have developed an ...
- This Battery Turns Carbon Dioxide Into Energyon February 13, 2017 at 10:59 am
The latter approach would be analogous to a flow battery, which reduces and oxidizes dissolved chemicals in aqueous solutions, except we are causing them to be reduced and oxidized here by ...
- What is a ‘Water Battery’?on August 3, 2015 at 12:59 pm
But a new battery designed at Ohio State actually circulates a water-based electrolyte internally. Researchers designed a device called an aqueous solar flow battery. It’s based on water ...
via Bing News