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New Type of 'Flow Battery' Can Store 10 Times the Energy of the Next Best Device (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Industrial-scale batteries, known as flow batteries, could one day usher in widespread use of renewable energy—but only if the devices can store large amounts of energy cheaply and feed it to the grid when the sun isn't shining and the winds are calm. That's something conventional flow batteries can't do. Now, researchers report that they've created a novel type of flow battery that uses lithium ion technology—the sort used to power laptops—to store about 10 times as much energy as the most common flow batteries on the market. With a few improvements, the new batteries could make a major impact on the way we store and deliver energy. The research, from the National University of Singapore, has one big flaw in particular: speed. It's 'very innovative' work, says Michael Aziz, a flow battery expert at Harvard University. But he adds that even though the novel battery has a high energy density, the rate at which it delivers that power is 10,000 times slower than conventional flow batteries, far too slow for most applications. Wang and his colleagues acknowledge the limitation, but they say they should be able to improve the delivery rate with further improvements to the membrane and the charge-ferrying redox mediators.
storage of energy in a field vs storage of energy in a chemical potential.
When does the battery become capacitor?
When the voltage across it is directly proportional to percentage of charge.
And they already did, many years ago. That's what "supercapacitors" are: Electrochemical cells where the charge is stored by migrating, but not ionization-state-changing, ions in a solution (rather than by migrating electrons within two conductors (one metal, the other metal or conductive liquid) separated by an insulator, as in a conventional or electrolytic capacitor, or ionization-state-changing ions in the cells of a conventional battery,where the voltage only changes slightly with state of charge until nearly full discharge.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A typical li-ion battery produces ~10Wh. 10000 times less, means 1 mWh. This is roughly what a lemon can produce.
Get your entities/units right. Wh is a measure of energy - in a battery that's storage capacity - something these batteries are supposedly good (10x better) at.
The issue with them is power delivery, which is measured in Watts (or expressed in current at a given voltage, as power=current x voltage) .
Oblig. car analogy: this new battery has a larger fuel tank, but the fuel line to the engine is much smaller.
That's something conventional flow batteries can't do.hat's something conventional flow batteries can't do.
The hell they can't. Industrial-scale Vanadium Redox flow batteries are doing that right now, in utility companies, and have been for a couple years. (In New Zeeland, if I recall correctly.)
I think the reason they're not more widely used already is that they're under patent protection, the company is small, and its owners don't want to license the technology or dilute their equity, so the supply is limited to their ramp-up and funding sources.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
All they have to do is use the optical plasma inductor to take advantage of the phased interface phenomenon.