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May 20, 2024
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The battery uses iodine and bromine and offers impressive energy density.
What if we didn’t have to mine gigatons of lithium out of the ground in order to make batteries? After all, batteries haven’t always used lithium. And what if—stay with me—we used water, instead?
It sounds like the plot of a ridiculous sci-fi movie, except for the fact that it’s not. Scientists in China have created a battery that uses water as a primary component in the battery.
Researchers at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, led by professor Li Xianfeng, created a water-based battery that uses a mixed halogen solution. Bromine and iodine were used to create a multi-electron cathode—the negative side of the battery.
Aside from the obvious advantage of using something far more plentiful than lithium, the aqueous battery proved to be very energy dense, providing specific capacity of 840Ah/L (amp-hours per liter) and energy density of up to 1200Wh/L (watt-hours per liter).
The typical lithium-ion battery found in an e-bike is estimated to run in the neighborhood of 150-200Wh/kg. Even doubling an e-bike’s energy density would relieve most e-bike owners of any anxiety they feel about range.
The distance between publishing a study in Nature Energy and bringing a commercial product to market is vast, but studies like this give a glimpse of what our future holds.
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