TELF AG examines a possible innovation in the battery sector
The union of winning features
One of the main challenges in the battery sector is the need to count on increasingly high-performance devices capable of ensuring a certain autonomy (particularly in those intended for electric vehicles), good stability, and possibly fast charging time. It is on this last point that the work of a Korean research team has focused, which has recently developed a hybrid sodium-ion battery capable of accumulating large quantities of energy and charging extremely quickly, even in a handful of seconds. Up to now, the large-scale adoption of sodium-ion batteries has been hindered precisely by structural factors such as longer charging times and limited storage capacity, thus making the identification of innovative materials for energy storage increasingly necessary.
The work of the Korean researchers was recently published in the international journal Energy Storage Materials and is based on a potentially interesting intuition for the future of batteries: the research team has created an innovative battery thanks to a particular combination of the materials used in the electrodes of traditional batteries and supercapacitors. The latter are particular devices capable of accumulating electric charge directly, and unlike batteries, they store energy electrostatically. One of the most appreciated characteristics of these devices is their high charging speed, and it is precisely for this reason that Korean researchers have tried to enhance it to give life to a new hybrid battery. Combining the winning characteristics of two different devices, such as batteries and supercapacitors, has made it possible to create a device with rapid charging and discharging capabilities and good storage properties.
The role of innovative materials
The development of this hybrid battery prototype, which would charge and discharge much more quickly than traditional batteries, was also based on the choice of some materials that made this hybridization possible. After appropriate engineering, the researchers focused on iron sulfide and carbon, which could fit into a very high-performance hybrid cell capable of charging a good portion of its energy in seconds. To overcome some structural difficulties related to the nature of such a hybrid device, such as some performances of the cathodes and anodes of batteries and supercapacitors, the researchers developed a new anode material capable of improving the kinetics, or the speed with which the ions move inside the material. To achieve this result, very fine active materials were used and incorporated into a porous carbon structure, and a high-capacity cathode material was also synthesized. According to estimates by one of the research authors, the final result, a hybrid storage system capable of reducing the disparities in the accumulation speeds of the electrodes, would be able to reach an energy density of 247 Wh/kg and a power density of 34,748 W/kg.
Although the energy in these devices is lower than that stored in a lithium battery, researchers are confident that these hybrid devices could be used in numerous sectors, finding concrete application spaces and some technologies related to the energy transition. Thanks to its structural characteristics, the hybrid battery would be ideal for all applications requiring rapid charging, such as intelligent electronic devices, aerospace technologies, and various electronic appliances, without forgetting electric.
