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“No other reported structural battery compares in energy density to today’s advanced advanced lithium batteries. We have improved our previous version of structural zinc batteries on 10 different measures, some of which are 100 times better, to get there, ”he continued.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Scientific robotics Kotov points out that not only was the zinc-air battery chemistry that his team used about three times more energy dense than your standard Li-Ion brick, but by incorporating the battery into the robot’s body itself, they were able to open about 20 percent more space inside the robot than if it had used a conventional feeding system.
“It’s not the limit, however. We estimate that robots could have 72 times more power if their exteriors were replaced by zinc batteries, compared to a single lithium-ion battery, ”noted first author Mingqiang Wang.
Additionally, this battery design circumvents another difficult tradeoff seen in other efforts to incorporate batteries into a machine structure: that between the amount of power the battery can produce and its ability to withstand stress. Normally, metal-air electrochemical batteries use an aqueous solution to separate the cathode and the anode. The U of Michigan battery consists of a zinc electrode and an ambient air cathode separated by a layer of Kevlar fibers suspended in a water-based polymer gel that helps transfer hydroxide ions between the electrodes . Since the separation layers are effectively a solid, they will not rupture or burst under stress like a liquid separator would. And even if it does rupture, the solution is not toxic.
Additionally, the separation layer is so strong that it actually helps inhibit the formation of zinc dendrites, small metal growths between electrodes created during the charge-discharge cycle that degrade performance and life. drums. Lithium-ion batteries can last around 500 cycles without noticeably degrading, but zinc batteries start to decline after only 100.
Kotov compares the battery system to human body fat. Our fat not only stores energy for us, it also provides cushions for our joints and helps conserve body heat. As such, he expects the current single-battery design to eventually evolve into a distributed energy storage system. “We don’t have a single bag of fat, which would be bulky and require a lot of expensive energy transfer,” Kotov noted. “Distributed energy storage, which is the biological path, is the way forward for highly efficient biomorphic devices.”
Kotov hopes to have a commercial battery system ready in the next 3-5 years and expects the first buyers to be drone and robot makers. “And it’s not just about the big Amazon robots, but also the very small ones,” Kotov said. IEEE spectrum. “Energy storage is a very big problem for small, flexible and flexible robots.”
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