The materials needed, zinc and manganese, are common and readily available, which is an advantage with the zinc and manganese dioxide batteries.
“In a future large-scale battery production, material availability will be weighed against battery performance. The world has good access to iron, manganese and zinc. This is an absolute requirement for a truly large-scale battery production”, says Dag Noréus, professor at the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry at Stockholm University, who supervised the thesis work.
Prototypes on the new rechargeable battery have a constant battery capacity during the first 200 charge/discharge cycles, but lose about 50 percent of their capacity after 2,000 cycles.
“This is good compared to other batteries. And we are just in the beginning of the new battery chemistry; upcoming developments are expected to continually improve life expectancy”, says Mylad Chamoun, who defended his thesis on February 15 at the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry, Stockholm University.
“It is important to point out that the chemistry is cheap. Our technology wins in the end if you compare with other techniques. If you look at price per stored energy. The best lithium-ion batteries are at 200–250 euros per kilowatt-hour and lead acid batteries are at 100–150 euros per kilowatt-hour. Our cost analysis suggests that we will probably land at 20–40 euros per kilowatt-hour”, says Mylad Chamoun continues.
Mylad Chamoun is also one of the founders of the company Enerpoly, which will commercialize the new rechargeable battery. He emphasizes that the advantages of the water-based battery chemistry are safety and environmentally friendliness. These batteries do not explode or catch fire.
“There are already existing production and recycling structures for the raw materials, zinc and manganese, used in our common primary alkaline batteries”, says Mylad Chamoun at the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry, Stockholm University.
The results came as a spin-off from a collaboration with Höganäs AB around the iron electrode in an iron / air battery project financed by the Swedish Energy Agency.
The thesis Rechargeable Aqueous Batteries Based on Available Resources: Investigation and Development towards Efficient Battery Performance is available at DIVA.
