“Think of making a kind of layered pastry, like spanakopita,” Mitlin said. The new anode material, called sodium antimony telluride intermetallic – Na metal composite (NST-Na), is made by rolling a thin sheet of sodium metal onto an antimony telluride powder, folding it over on itself, and repeating many times. When the battery is being used to generate electricity, the ions move from the anode back to the cathode. When a rechargeable battery is being charged, ions (such as lithium or sodium) move from one component called the cathode to another called the anode. Mitlin is bullish on the idea that this new innovation and others from UT Austin, including a new solid electrolyte that boosts energy storage, will mean sodium batteries may soon be able to fill the growing demand for stationary energy storage. By comparison, sodium mining is cheaper and more environmentally friendly. Lithium-ion batteries typically also use cobalt, which is expensive and mined mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it has significant impacts on human health and the environment. At the same time, lithium mining has been criticized for its environmental impacts, including heavy groundwater use, soil and water pollution and carbon emissions. “This material is also exciting because the sodium metal anode theoretically has the highest energy density of any sodium anode,” Henkelman said.ĭemand is rising for stationary energy storage systems for homes and for smoothing out the ebb and flow of wind and solar energy on electric grids. Graeme Henkelman, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, used a computer model to explain, from a theoretical perspective, why the material has the unique properties it does. So if you suppress dendrite growth, you can charge and discharge faster, because all of a sudden it’s safe.”
“Typically, the faster you charge, the more of these dendrites you grow. “We’re essentially solving two problems at once,” said David Mitlin, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Research Laboratory who designed the new material. The team published their results in the journal Advanced Materials. In one of two recent sodium battery advances from UT Austin, the new material solves the dendrite problem and recharges as quickly as a lithium-ion battery. Unfortunately, in earlier sodium batteries, a component called the anode would tend to grow needle-like filaments called dendrites that can cause the battery to electrically short and even catch fire or explode. University of Texas at Austin researchers have created a new sodium-based battery material that is highly stable, capable of recharging as quickly as a traditional lithium-ion battery and able to pave the way toward delivering more energy than current battery technologies.įor about a decade, scientists and engineers have been developing sodium batteries, which replace both lithium and cobalt used in current lithium-ion batteries with cheaper, more environmentally friendly sodium.
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