Australian researchers create the world's first working "proton battery"
Australian researchers have created the world’s first working “proton battery”. The device was developed as an environmentally friendly alternative to lithium-ion batteries and, after a number of improvements, will be able to act as an even more capacious and efficient storage device.
“Our latest achievement is an important step towards cheap, sustainable proton batteries that will help meet our future energy needs without damaging our already fragile environment,” said research chief RMIT University professor John Andrews.
Instead of lithium, the key components of the proton battery are water and carbon. According to scientists, their small prototype is already able to compete with lithium-ion batteries, which are increasingly using renewable energy sources to power homes and electric vehicles. A press release from Queen’s University of Melbourne says that if scaled up, their technology could be applied to medium-term storage across local power grids, citing Tesla’s giant energy storage project in South Australia as an example.
To generate electricity, the prototype uses “a carbon electrode as hydrogen storage in combination with a reversible fuel cell.” According to the developers, thanks to readily available components, such devices can be more environmentally friendly and cheaper than lithium-ion counterparts. Their scientific work was published in the journal Hydrogen
Energy, and the researchers’ experiments showed that their miniature proton battery with an active internal surface area of only 5.5 square centimeters (the size of a small coin) could store the same amount of energy per unit mass as commercially available lithium batteries. … And this figure was achieved without any optimization.
Scientists believe that their innovative technology could become commercial in five to ten years and potentially compete with Tesla’s Powerwall systems (Powerpack). “Future work will focus on further improving performance and energy density through the use of atomically thin carbon-based laminates such as graphene. Our ultimate goal is to create a proton battery that will be truly competitive and even more efficient than lithium-ion batteries, ”said John Andrews. So
urce: ecotechnica.com.ua