The battery is not typically a subject that stirs the soul and makes people sit up and listen but there is a lot happening in the world of batteries and the area of renewable energy. Batteries currently (pun completely intended) come in all shapes and sizes and power, everything from hearing aids to smartphones to vehicles to room-sized batteries that provide emergency power for telephone exchanges and data centers. The worldwide battery industry generates over 48 billion dollars (US) with a 6% annual growth. With that much money being made, one would think there would be a lot being put into research.
If you google “battery research” you will see numerous results and Canadians seem to be some of the leaders in this field. If you think of the Canadian identity and the battery you can see some common characteristics; humble, unassuming, often overlooked but still important in the world of science and beyond.
Dr. Jeff Dahn of Dalhousie University is a leader in the field of lithium-ion batteries and even won the $1 million Hertzberg prize (Canada’s top science award) last year for his research. This was one of the latest awards he has received which also includes the Governor General’s Innovation Award. He has been studying lithium and lithium-ion batteries since 1978 with a concentration on increasing the energy density of said batteries. He has been trying to find ways to improve production, sustainability, cost reduction, and storage using novel materials and has been working with Tesla Motors to this end.
Lithium-ion batteries have held the market for a number of years and although the price of them has come down, they are still relatively expensive. Two things that you want in a battery are its reliability and cheap price. Much of the research that has been done has focused on improving the lithium-ion battery but the battery market is due for the next best thing. Studies have been done on different chemical combinations, using salt water as the battery’s electrolyte, silicon-air batteries but these all work on the same basic principle of a chemical reaction happening when the two electrodes (the cathode readily losses electrons, the anode accepts these electrons) are joined externally to complete the circuit. This can be said of all batteries.
MIT professor of materials chemistry, Don Sadoway has had some truly innovative thinking. What if the energy from aluminum smelting could be used in a battery? Aluminum smelting is a cheap, energy-intensive process in which the purified aluminum is boiled out of the bauxite ore. Sadoway had the idea that if the normally one-way process could be doubled back upon itself, maybe the energy could be harnessed in some way. This may seem like an insane idea considering that molten aluminum has a temperature 470 degrees Celsius, which is just slightly cooler than the temperature of a combustion chamber of a car engine. The idea itself has a fairly simple concept of dropping two alloys of different densities into a container with some salt poured on top. When the cell is powered up the metals will separate into two layers with the molten salt layer between them. This salt layer conducts electrons back and forth.
This isn’t just any old battery. It is powerful enough to provide electricity for whole neighbourhoods and could be engineered to an even larger and more powerful format. This idea has the possibility of replacing whole power grid. It has also proven to be energy-efficient, very long-lasting (we are talking lasting decades as opposed to years), reliable and safe. This would be a real boon for this energy-hungry world.
The main drawback to this type of research is that it sometimes take decades from the research to a prototype to an actual working battery. Funding may come and go depending on the fashion of the time but the end aim of a working clean energy source may be getting a little closer as we speak.
–Janice Willson
Photo Source: the author
