A sodium-sulfur battery, also known as a Na-S battery, is an energy storage system that uses a molten mixture of sodium and sulfur as an electrolyte.
A new battery has been developed with four times the capacity of lithium-ion batteries and at a lower cost.
An international research team led by Dr Shenlong Zhao from the University of Sydney has developed a new type of battery that has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of transitioning to a decarbonized economy.
Such batteries have four times the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries and are much cheaper to produce. The team used sodium sulfur, a molten salt that can be extracted from seawater, to create the battery, making it a more cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion batteries.
Although sodium-sulfur (Na-S) batteries have been around for more than half a century, they have remained an inferior alternative, and their widespread use has been limited by low energy capacity and short life cycles.
Using a simple pyrolysis process and carbon-based electrodes to enhance the reactivity of sulfur and the reversibility of the reaction between sulfur and sodium, the researchers’ battery shed its previously lackluster reputation and exhibited ultra-high capacity and ultra-long battery life at room temperature. life temperature.
The researchers say Na-S batteries are also a more energy-dense, less toxic alternative to lithium-ion batteries, which, while widely used in electronics and energy storage, are expensive to manufacture and recycle.
Dr. Zhao’s sodium-sulfur batteries are specifically designed to provide high-performance solutions for large-scale renewable energy storage systems such as power grids, while significantly reducing operating costs.
According to the Clean Energy Council, 32.5 per cent of Australia’s electricity will come from clean sources by 2021, and the industry is accelerating. Home energy storage is also growing. According to a recent report, a record 33,000 batteries will be installed in 2021.
“Our sodium batteries have the potential to drastically reduce costs while providing four times the storage capacity. This is a major breakthrough in the development of renewable energy, and although it reduces costs in the long run, there are some financial barriers to market entry,” said lead researcher Dr. Zhao said.
“When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, we need high-quality storage solutions that don’t cost the planet and are easily accessible at a local or regional level.
“We hope that by delivering a technology that reduces costs, we can move to clean energy faster. This may go without saying, but the faster we decarbonize – the better our chances of controlling warming.
“Storage solutions made using abundant resources such as sodium – which can be processed from seawater – also have the potential to ensure greater energy security more broadly and allow more countries to join the transition to decarbonisation.”
Laboratory-scale batteries (ion batteries) have been successfully fabricated and used in[{” attribute=””>University of Sydney’s chemical engineering facility. The researchers now plan to improve and commercialize the recently fabricated Ah-level pouch cells.
Reference: “Atomically Dispersed Dual-Site Cathode with a Record High Sulfur Mass Loading for High-Performance Room-Temperature Sodium–Sulfur Batteries” by Bin-Wei Zhang, Liuyue Cao, Cheng Tang, Chunhui Tan, Ningyan Cheng, Wei-Hong Lai, Yun-Xiao Wang, Zhen-Xiang Cheng, Juncai Dong, Yuan Kong, Shi-Xue Dou and Shenlong Zhao, 29 October 2022, Advanced Materials.
DOI: 10.1002/adma.202206828
