![]() ![]() “The ingredients are cheap, and the thing is safe - it cannot burn,” Sadoway says. The three ingredients they ended up with are cheap and readily available - aluminum, no different from the foil at the supermarket sulfur, which is often a waste product from processes such as petroleum refining and widely available salts. “Once you get down to near body temperature, it becomes practical” to make batteries that don’t require special insulation and anticorrosion measures, he says. They tried some polymers but ended up looking at a variety of molten salts that have relatively low melting points - close to the boiling point of water, as opposed to nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for many salts. As for the electrolyte, “we were not going to use the volatile, flammable organic liquids” that have sometimes led to dangerous fires in cars and other applications of lithium-ion batteries, Sadoway says. The cheapest of all the non-metals is sulfur, so that became the second electrode material. ![]() Then came deciding what to pair the aluminum with for the other electrode, and what kind of electrolyte to put in between to carry ions back and forth during charging and discharging. ![]() “So, I said, well, let’s just make that a bookend. But the second-most-abundant metal in the marketplace - and actually the most abundant metal on Earth - is aluminum. The commercially dominant metal, iron, doesn’t have the right electrochemical properties for an efficient battery, he says. So, Sadoway started studying the periodic table, looking for cheap, Earth-abundant metals that might be able to substitute for lithium. In addition to being expensive, lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable electrolyte, making them less than ideal for transportation. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry. “I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale stationary storage, and ultimately for automotive ,” explains Sadoway, who is the John F. The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available. The key innovation is that the regeneration of lithium was successfully performed for all relevant cathode chemistries, including their mixture.As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. The presented technology achieves a recovery rate for Li of up to 70% without applying any corrosive leachates or utilizing high temperatures. The mechanisms of mechanochemical transformation, aqueous leaching, and lithium purification were investigated. Two different processes have been developed to regenerate lithium and transform it into pure Li 2CO 3. The introduced technology uses Al as a reducing agent in the mechanochemical reaction. Herein we report a highly efficient mechanochemically induced acid-free process for recycling Li from cathode materials of different chemistries such as LiCoO 2, LiMn 2O 4, Li(CoNiMn)O 2, and LiFePO 4. Unfortunately, all used recycling technologies are always associated with large energy consumption and utilization of corrosive reagents, which creates a risk to the environment. ![]() The increasing lithium-ion battery production calls for profitable and ecologically benign technologies for their recycling. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |