Researchers have been
looking for lithium-ion battery
alternatives that would be
lower cost and more
sustainable to manufacture
and recycle.
There's already an established
aluminum manufacturing and
recycling industry.
With lithium-ion batteries,
few economically feasible
technologies for battery
recycling currently exist.
Aluminum-based batteries
would be cheaper to make,
because aluminum is the
third most abundant element
in the Earth’s crust after
oxygen and silicon.
Aluminum is also light-weight.
Scientists have stumbled over
what materials to use for the
anode and cathode of the battery
so that it could store enough
energy content.
Researchers
from Sweden’s
Chalmers University
of Technology, and the
National Institute of
Chemistry in Slovenia,
discovered a new aluminum
battery design that promises
twice the energy density
compared to previous versions.
The new concept was described
in an article in the journal
Energy Storage Materials.
Prior designs used aluminum
as the negative electrode
( the anode ),
while the positive electrode
( the cathode )
was made of graphite.
Graphite doesn’t have enough
energy content to be useful
in a battery cell.
The researchers replaced graphite
with an organic, nano-structured
cathode made of the carbon-based
molecule anthraquinone.
This organic material
in the cathode enables storage
of positive charge-carriers
from the electrolyte
( the solution in which ions
move between the electrodes --
which enables higher energy
density in the battery ).
“Because the new cathode material
... the batteries can make better
usage of aluminum’s potential,”
Chalmers researcher
Niklas Lindahl
said in a statement.
There are currently
no commercially available
aluminum batteries.
They may replace
all lithium-ion batteries,
or at least for some
applications.
Another battery research team
at UNSW in Sydney, Australia,
said in December 2018 that
they could improve rechargeable
aluminum batteries by using
a large organic chemical
compound as the part of
the battery that stores energy,
which was a challenge
before that.
“Developing batteries using aluminum
has received a lot of expectation
for delivering high energy to price ratios,”
said Dong Jun Kim, PhD
of UNSW’s School of Chemistry.