Battery technology especially in smartphones has yet to be perfected. As gadgets become smaller, slimmer, thinner, and lighter, batteries also need to adapt not only in size but also in capacity and efficiency. Scientists are always looking for ways on how improve battery performance and durability. Battery life isn’t just about how many hours it can last juicing up a device. A battery’s shelf life usually pertains to how many cycles and how long it can offer optimized performance.
We’ve heard of several projects and experiments already about improving battery tech but all of them are still under development or testing. Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ researchers recently worked on a flow battery that is said to “store energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water”. It is a chemistry that allows a non-toxic and non-corrosive battery with a longer lifetime, with the main goal of decreasing production cost.
The idea is that these flow batteries store energy in liquid solutions in external tanks. They are said to offer storage solution for renewable energy like solar or wind. This development is significant as it has potential to reduce degradation of energy capacity and quality. The goal is to improve the numbers and restore capacity even after hundreds of charge-dischare cycles.
These Flow batteries certainly have potential to survive thousands of complete charge-discharge cycles. This is possible as per the team who engineered a battery that loses only one percent of its capacity after only 1000 cycles. That seems impossible but with science and technology, everything is possible.
This particular research was made by a team of scientists lead by Michael Aziz (Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies) and Roy Gordon (Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science). It was published in ACS Energy Letters only last February 7, 2017.
VIA: Harvard SEAS
