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Brian Westenhaus

Brian Westenhaus

Brian is the editor of the popular energy technology site New Energy and Fuel. The site’s mission is to inform, stimulate, amuse and abuse the…

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MIT Engineers Design New Low-Cost Battery For Energy Storage

  • MIT engineers have created a new low-cost battery for storage of renewable energy sources made from inexpensive and abundant materials.
  • Less expensive than lithium-ion battery technology, the new architecture uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials with a molten salt electrolyte in between.
  • The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations.
Battery Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have designed a battery made from inexpensive, abundant materials, that could provide low-cost backup storage for renewable energy sources. Less expensive than lithium-ion battery technology, the new architecture uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials with a molten salt electrolyte in between.

The new battery architecture is described in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Wind and solar advocates are building out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, thus need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific landscapes that are not always available.

The MIT led group’s chemistry architecture could help to fill the intermittency gaps.

Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry said, “I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale stationary storage, and ultimately for automotive [uses].”

In addition to being expensive, lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable electrolyte, making them less than ideal for transportation. So, Sadoway started studying the periodic table, looking for cheap, Earth-abundant metals that might be able to substitute for lithium. The commercially dominant metal, iron, doesn’t have the right electrochemical properties for an efficient battery, he said. But the second-most-abundant metal in the marketplace – and actually the most abundant metal on Earth – is aluminum.

“So, I said, well, let’s just make that a bookend. It’s gonna be aluminum,” he commented.

Next up was deciding what to pair the aluminum with for the other electrode, and what kind of electrolyte to put in between to carry ions back and forth during charging and discharging. The cheapest of all the non-metals is sulfur, so that became the second electrode material.

As for the electrolyte, “we were not going to use the volatile, flammable organic liquids” that have sometimes led to dangerous fires in cars and other applications of lithium-ion batteries, Sadoway said. They tried some polymers but ended up looking at a variety of molten salts that have relatively low melting points – close to the boiling point of water, as opposed to nearly 1,000° Fahrenheit for many salts. “Once you get down to near body temperature, it becomes practical” to make batteries that don’t require special insulation and anticorrosion measures, he noted.

The three ingredients they ended up with are cheap and readily available – aluminum, no different from the foil at the supermarket; sulfur, which is often a waste product from processes such as petroleum refining; and widely available salts. “The ingredients are cheap, and the thing is safe – it cannot burn,” Sadoway said.

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° Celsius (230° Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25° C (77° F).

Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction.

The chloro-aluminate salt they chose “essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging,” Sadoway said. “We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting.”

“It’s funny,” he said, 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 said. “I guess it was serendipity for us.”

Additionally, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. “As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat,” Sadoway said.

In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, “you’d store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you’d draw electricity after dark, and you’d do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature.”

This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.

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. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year’s European Inventor Award.

The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway noted. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, “if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don’t have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility.” So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve those chargers.

The new technology is already the basis for a new spinoff company called Avanti, which has licensed the patents to the system, co-founded by Sadoway and Luis Ortiz ’96 ScD ’00, who was also a co-founder of Ambri. “The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale,” Sadoway said, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles.

Would a battery based on sulfur run the risk of producing the foul odors associated with some forms of sulfur? Not a chance, Sadoway said. “The rotten-egg smell is in the gas, hydrogen sulfide. This is elemental sulfur, and it’s going to be enclosed inside the cells.” If you were to try to open up a lithium-ion cell in your kitchen, he says (and please don’t try this at home!), “the moisture in the air would react and you’d start generating all sorts of foul gases as well. These are legitimate questions, but the battery is sealed, it’s not an open vessel. So I wouldn’t be concerned about that.”

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The research team included members from Peking University, Yunnan University and the Wuhan University of Technology, in China; the University of Louisville, in Kentucky; the University of Waterloo, in Canada; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee; and MIT. The work was supported by the MIT Energy Initiative, the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and ENN Group.

***

This sounds pretty good! But no mention of how many watt hours by battery volume or weight. Then there are those “going to scale” things that come up when leaving the lab and getting to a factory setup.

One does hope there will be continued refinement. The press release makes it sound as if the whole thing just fell together by virtue of making low cost choices. One can be certain a lot of thought went into those decisions.

What we do know that gives some pause is this technology needs to be used to stay warm enough to work well. There has to be an energy price in this and that was not revealed or discussed. One might want to be sure these are real cheap as continuous duty with only cycles in the “hundreds” might not actually cut the economic starting ribbon.

By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel

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Leave a comment
  • Dewey Vand on September 25 2022 said:
    One thing that has always bothered me about seawater desalination processes is yes, they do extract clean water , but they also leave behind a brine of salt much denser than before. Every desalinator plan I'm aware of puts that concentrated brine back in the source sea water, counterintuitively so.

    Is there any chance at all that we can kill two birds at once here by first desalinating seawater with electrolysis using renewable electricity ( or osmotic membranes if need be), then using the residual brine as the base for the molten salt battery ? Maybe even use molten salts as energy storage on their own...a heat "pile' that can be used for thermoelectric conversion as needed. The Nucla small nuclear plant in my state of Wyoming will go this route... storing excess heat in molten salts for conversion on demand.

    There is more than one alternative energy application for molten salts or this aluminum-sulfur-salt battery process.
  • John Paul deOliveira on September 26 2022 said:
    Promising !

    As the author mentions, if the material needs daily usage to keep a minimum operating temperature, duty cycles of hundreds, even if improved to thousands, may be insufficient, as that is only a few months to years lifespan. Though the article mentions it in relation to high charging rates, it did not talk about low charging rate cycles which most likely are many times higher.

    If the watt hours per volume, and especially, weight were competitive, I would imagine they would have stated those parameter advantages.

    Imo the most important aspect could be the absence of dendritic shorting and high charging rate, the material properties could be studied and perhaps applied to more energy dense materials.

    In some climates, the battery may be solar heated/insulated for the most efficient operating temperature, and could have dual usage as a building system thermal mass.

Leave a comment




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