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Most of today 's batteries consist of rare lithium extracted from the mountains of South America. If the world exhausts this source, then the production of batteries could stagnate.
Sodium is a very cheap and abundant alternative to the earth using lithium-ion batteries that are also known to become violets and burn if they are exposed to water – even just water in the water. # 39; air.
Global efforts to make sodium-ion batteries as functional as lithium-ion batteries have long controlled the trend of sodium explosion, but have not yet resolved how to prevent sodium ions from get lost during the first charges.
Now, researchers at Purdue University have come up with a version of sodium powder that solves this problem and keeps a charge properly.
"The addition of sodium powder manufactured during electrode treatment requires only slight modifications to the battery production process," said Vilas Pol, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue. "It's a potential way to advance sodium ion battery technology in the industry."
The work, published in a recent issue of Journal of Energy Sources, is part of the university's global celebrations of health, space, artificial intelligence and sustainability as part of Purdue's 150th anniversary. These are the four themes of the year-long Ideas Festival, designed to portray Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world problems.
Although sodium-ion batteries are physically heavier than lithium-ion technology, researchers have studied sodium-ion batteries because they could store energy for large solar and wind systems at a lower cost .
The problem is that sodium ions stick to the hard end of a battery's carbon, called anode, during initial charge cycles and do not move to the end of the cathode. The ions turn into a structure called a solid electrolyte interface.
"Normally, the solid electrolyte interface is good because it protects the carbon particles from the battery's acidic electrolyte, where electricity is conducted," Pol said. "But too much interface consumes the sodium ions we need to charge the battery."
Purdue researchers have proposed the use of powdered sodium, which provides the required amount of sodium for the solid electrolyte interface to protect the carbon, but does not form to consume sodium ions.
They minimized the exposure of sodium to moisture that would burn it by turning the sodium powder into a glove box filled with argon gas. To make the powder, they used an ultrasound – the same tool used to monitor the development of the fetus – to melt the pieces of sodium into a milky purple liquid. The liquid is then cooled to a powder and is suspended in a hexane solution to uniformly disperse the powder particles.
Only a few drops of the sodium suspension on the anode or cathode electrodes during their manufacture allow a sodium ion battery cell to charge and discharge with more stability and greater capacity.
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