And what better place to find salt than in seawater? This is why Stefano Passerini’s team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has developed a prototype battery based on seawater, with the sodium that is naturally dissolved in it carrying the charge. It is early days, but magnesium could one day be the basis of batteries more powerful and safer than those made with lithium or sodium.Ī major selling point of sodium batteries is that they can be made from a plentiful resource, salt. Why not use an ion that can carry a greater charge – like magnesium, with its +2 charge? Several research teams are working on just this. However, their ions can only carry an electrical charge of +1. Lithium and sodium are both good battery ingredients. While having almost the same chemistry as lithium, it has none of the environmental baggage or geographical limitations, but that doesn’t make it an automatic solution. One half of sodium chloride, or table salt, it sits in the square below lithium on the periodic table, also in group 1, but weightier. Lithium’s close chemical cousin, sodium, has been the basis for research into new batteries for years now.
#Lithium batteries how to#
Unfortunately, there isn’t going to be a single solution to the problem of how to replace lithium-ion batteries, which is why people have been dreaming up all sorts of variations on the format, to solve the world’s energy storage needs.
There are also plans to power our green energy future using wind turbines and solar panels, but that will, in turn, require enormous battery cells to store said electricity for when it is needed.Īll of this means that we must continue to mine lithium, but there is no guarantee that we’ll be able to find enough raw material to keep up with demand. Lithium-ion batteries power our phones, our computers and, increasingly, our electric vehicles.
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