Scientists design super battery made with cheap, easily affordable chemical element, Na – Salt-based cell has surprisingly good energy density and charges in seconds
Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed a powerful, hybrid sodium-ion battery that charges quickly and offers impressive energy density.
This revolutionary prototype uses sodium (Na), a chemical element that is more than 1,000 times more abundant and cheaper than lithium (Li), the main component of conventional batteries.
In general, sodium ion batteries face limitations such as lower power output, limited storage properties and longer charging times. The innovative battery design, led by Professor Jeung Ku Kang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST, combats the existing limitations of sodium-ion batteries by integrating the anode materials used in traditional batteries with the cathodes used for supercapacitors in a hybrid system . The result is said to deliver high storage capacity and fast charge-discharge speeds.
Several possibilities
The development of the hybrid battery relied on improving the energy storage rate of battery-type anodes and increasing the relatively low capacity of supercapacitor-type cathode materials.
The KAIST research team leveraged two different metal-organic frameworks to create an optimized synthesis of hybrid batteries, culminating in an anode material with improved kinetics and a high-capacity cathode material.
The fully assembled hybrid sodium-ion energy storage device reportedly exceeds the energy density of commercial lithium-ion batteries and matches the power density characteristics of supercapacitors. Professor Kang says this new battery, with an energy density of 247 Wh/kg and a power density of 34,748 W/kg, could be used in a wide range of industries, including electric vehicles, smart electronics and aerospace technologies.
The findings of this study, co-authored by KAIST PhD students Jong Hui Choi and Dong Won Kim, have been published in the international journal Energy storage materials with the catchy title of “Low crystallinity conductive multivalency iron sulfide embedded S-doped anode and large-area O-doped cathode of 3D porous N-rich graphitic carbon frameworks for high-performance sodium-ion hybrid energy storage.”