New safe battery designed for solar homes
Want a Solar-Powered Home? Here’s a New Battery That Won’t Ignite
As solar panels and wind turbines spread worldwide, they’ll need batteries to store power for times when they don’t produce it. Harvard debuts a promising prototype. By Wendy Koch, National Geographic SEPTEMBER 24, 2015 If you dream of an off-grid house powered by the sun, plan on a battery to store energy for cloudy days—ideally, one that won’t catch fire. Harvard researchers might have just the fix.
“It is a huge step forward. It opens this up for anyone to use,” says Michael Aziz, Harvard University engineering professor and co-author of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. Because the battery is safe and non-corrosive, he says, it’s well suited for both businesses and homes, adding: “This is chemistry I’d be happy to put in my basement.”………http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2015/09/150924-nonflammable-battery-could-charge-solar-homes/
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This flow battery is an extension of some existing batteries including important contributions from Australia. There is the zinc-bromine battery from WA (Murdoch?) and the vanadium battery from Univ of NSW (Maria Skyllas-Kazakos). These batteries have been around for several decades but commercially used only in niche applications.
Flow batteries differ from batteries in common use (lead/acid, “dry cell”, “alkaline”, nickel/cadmium , metal hydride, lithium) in that the active (energy producing) chemicals are not in the form of solid electrodes (that get used up during discharge) but are dissolved in the liquid (electrolyte) between two solid inert electrodes (that don’t get used up during discharge). The electrodes are where the action happens – chemical energy converted to electrical energy.
The web pages don’t mention the electrodes but they may be a readily available inexpensive form of carbon. This contrasts with fuel cells (e.g., hydrogen/oxygen) where the electrodes are usually fairly exotic and expensive catalysts.
The quinone is also likely to be a readily and cheaply synthesized dye such as AQDS (anthraquinone disulphonic acid, a member of a large group of commonly used dyes or dye precursors).
Recharging the batteries is matter of emptying the tanks containing the used up (inactive) solutions and refilling the active solution fuel tanks.
In principle, the inactive solutions can be reformed to active solutions either chemically or by electrolysis. This would probably be done at a central processing site, akin to a refinery.
The advantages of the ferricyanide/quinone batteries appears to be price and voltage.
There is a lot, lot more that needs to be checked before they get to a commercial stage.
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