Liquid Batteries To Help Renewable Energy Sources Commercialize

Eco friendly and more importantly #-Link-Snipped-# are the need of hour. This is where today's battery industry is stuck. When the industry is researching for alternative power storage devices, the batteries thus developed tend to have some or the other drawback. However, there is an option available to make an Eco-friendly and economical variant. It is called the Liquid Metal battery. In other words, it is high temperature battery!

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Image Credit: Renewable Energy World

Ever thought of a battery that works at high temperatures (700 Deg C)?  The scientists at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done just that. Researching on a project to store power generated through a non-conventional energy resources, Scientists at MIT stumbled across liquid batteries. These power storage devices are made up of positive and negative electrodes and electrolyte like others. The peculiarity lies in their physical state. All of them are in a liquid form. The three entities i.e., the two electrodes and electrolytes remain separated because of their density difference.

Donald Sodoway, the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT feels that it was easy to construct a battery that suited all the objectives of the research except one. It wouldn't be economical. He believes that making an expensive eco-friendly battery is simple but then it would be of no use if we cannot commercialize it. Nobody would use it. This thought gave a direction to his study. He settled with three materials that Sodoway feel are abundantly and easily available. For the negative electrode he chose magnesium while a salt solution of Magnesium Chloride served as an electrolyte. Liquid antimony made the bottom positive electrode.

The functioning of the battery is as simple as in any power storage device. Magnesium atoms lose two electrons while crossing the electrolyte and gain the same on reaching the negative electrode. For charging the battery, the battery is connected to a power source which reverses the effect. The process is similar if one were to run an Aluminum smelter in reverse. The research is inspired from Sodoway's earlier works on electro-chemistry of aluminum smelting. The use of high temperatures there are of prime importance in the liquid battery.

The concept of Liquid battery is not exactly unique. However, it is the MIT team who were the first to develop this efficient battery. To commercialize the product, Sodoway and his team have established a company called LMBC - Liquid Metal Battery Corporation if the technology is successful, it would mean a revolution in power sector. Resulting in an increase of the present non-conventional energy consumption!