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Scientists have long warned that if the world exhausts its source of lithium, exploited to power modern devices, the production of batteries could stagnate.
However, researchers at Purdue University have manufactured sodium powder lithium batteries that do not require the rare material that is extracted from the mountains of South America.
It is not new that sodium is a very cheap and abundant alternative in the land with the use of lithium-ion batteries. The problem with sodium is that it is known to turn purple and burn if exposed to water, even water.
Global efforts to manufacture sodium-ion batteries that are as functional as lithium-ion batteries have long been controlling the trend of sodium explosion, but have not yet resolved how to prevent sodium ions from occurring. "lose"
But researchers at Purdue University claimed to have solved this problem with the latest development of their sodium battery, even stating that it could hold a charge properly.
"The addition of sodium powder manufactured during electrode processing only requires slight modifications to the battery production process," said Vilas Pol, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue.
"This is a potential way to advance sodium ion battery technology in the industry."
Although sodium-ion batteries would be physically heavier than lithium-ion technology, researchers have studied sodium-ion batteries because they could store energy for large solar and wind farms at a lower cost .
The problem was that sodium ions sticked to the hard carbon end of a battery, called the anode, during initial charge cycles and did not move toward the end of the cathode. The ions would form a structure called "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," explained Pol. "But too much interface consumes the sodium ions we need to charge the battery."
Purdue researchers solved this problem by using sodium in powder form, which provided the required amount of sodium for the solid electrolyte interface to protect the carbon, but did not accumulate so as 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 sodium lumps into a milky purple liquid. The liquid was then cooled to a powder and 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 allowed the ion-sodium cell to charge and discharge with more stability and greater capacity.
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