Sodium Battery Work: Li-Ion Performance

Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous, used in numerous applications such as cell phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But they are made from materials, such as cobalt and lithium, that are rare, expensive, or found mostly outside the US. As demand for electric vehicles and electricity storage rises, these materials will become harder to get and possibly more expensive. Lithium-based batteries may also be problematic in meeting the tremendous growing demand for power grid energy storage and they continue to pose a danger due to volatility.

On the other hand, sodium-ion batteries, made from cheap, abundant, and sustainable sodium from the earth’s oceans or crust, could make a good candidate for large-scale energy storage, and have been the subject of much research, especially in the flow battery domain. Unfortunately, they don’t hold as much energy as lithium batteries. They also have trouble being recharged as would be required for effective energy storage. A key problem for some of the most promising cathode materials is that a layer of inactive sodium crystals builds up at the surface of the cathode, stopping the flow of sodium ions and, consequently, killing the battery.

Now, Washington State University (WSU) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers have created a sodium-ion battery that holds as much energy and works as well as some commercial lithium-ion battery chemistries, making for a potentially viable battery technology out of abundant and cheap materials.

The team reports one of the best results to date for a sodium-ion battery. It is able to deliver a capacity similar to some lithium-ion batteries and to recharge successfully, keeping more than 80 percent of its charge after 1,000 cycles. The research, led by Yuehe Lin, professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and Xiaolin Li, a senior research scientist at PNNL is published in the journal, ACS Energy Letters.

“This is a major development for sodium-ion batteries,” said Dr. Imre Gyuk, director of Energy Storage for the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity who supported this work at PNNL. “There is great interest around the potential for replacing Li-ion batteries with Na-ion in many applications.”

“The key challenge is for the battery to have both high energy density and a good cycle life,” said Junhua Song, lead author on the paper and a WSU PhD graduate who is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Read the details of the solution and the full article at Cleantech Concepts.

Source: University of Washington, PNNL and Cleantech Concepts.

Tom Breunig is publisher and managing editor at Cleantech Concepts, focused on tracking cleantech R&D. He is also a technology scout for industrial investors.

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