The Future of Battery Technology
Batteries have become an essential part of everyone’s life, whether it be your phone or your car, you interact with a battery in some way throughout your day. What most people don’t know is that batteries have been around for around 2,200 years with our earliest example of an electrical battery being the Baghdad Battery rumored to have been used for medical treatment. However, there are no written records of how this item was used and thus we can’t be sure that it was a battery at all. If it was a lead-acid battery, then it was a couple of millennium ahead of its time.
The battery is a fairly new invention, having come about after the discovery of electricity, as this novel concept was becoming experimented on, an inventor named Alessandro Volta discovered that if you placed an acidic liquid into a tub with an anode and cathode (Positive and Negative rods respectively) then you could create a consistent flow of electricity, thus the first battery was made. To understand how any type of battery works, you must first understand how electricity works. Electricity can be described as “a fundamental form of energy observable in positive and negative forms that occurs naturally (as in lightning) or is produced (as in a generator) and that is expressed in terms of the movement and interaction of electrons” if you remember back to your high school chemistry you may remember that electrons are negatively charged particles that surround the nucleus of an atom, in an electrical current a highly conductive metal such as copper is used to pass electrons from atom to atom thus creating an electrical current. Lead-acid batteries use chemical energy and convert it into electrical energy, most lead-acid batteries work in the same way. You must have a positive cathode and negative anode, a positive cathode wants electrons and a negative anode wants to release its electrons. You then want an electrolyte to make sure that the electrons don’t just travel to the cathode inside of the battery without powering something. A wire is then attached to both the anode and the cathode and a load (such as a light bulb) is placed on the wire, the electrons pass through the wire and powers whatever is causing the load. A car battery uses a lead dioxide cathode and a lead anode that are in a sulfuric acid and water solution which is the electrolyte. The lead anode reacts with the sulfuric acid and creates lead sulfate and also releases a positively charged hydrogen and two electrons, the electrons flow through the wire and power the load, then the lead dioxide reacts with the sulfuric acid and three positively charged hydrogens and the two electrons from the previous reaction to create lead sulfate and water.
One of the newest types of batteries that have become much more prevalent in applications that require the battery to be charged and discharged continually are Lithium-Ion batteries. These batteries work very similarly to lead-acid batteries, the major differences come from the use of different elements like lithium, carbon and a few other metals that can work to help the lithium do its job. Lithium batteries have become more prevalent and are used in phones, many household appliances, and car batteries. There are many reasons that Lithium-Ion batteries are more prevalent than lead-acid batteries, one of the most compelling reasons for the change is the weight reduction, Lithium-Ion batteries are up to six times lighter than a lead-acid battery of the same size. This means that an electric car can use more batteries and not be as heavy as it would be if it used lead-acid batteries. Another big reason is that they have a much better energy density than lead-acid batteries, this means that if you hook up a light bulb to a Lithium-Ion battery and one to a lead-acid battery of the same size, the Lithium-Ion battery will power the light bulb for much longer, it is estimated that the Lithium-Ion has three times more energy density than lead-acid batteries.
Recently, there have been a couple of developments in battery technologies. What many think the next big thing will be solid state batteries. Most of the advancements made in battery technology are made to improve energy density, weight, and charging capabilities/speed. The solid state battery is very promising in all of these categories and offers a reduction of the size of battery systems in cars and other tools. As all of our technologies advance, we will begin to need longer battery life, much longer than what we have right now. Solid-state batteries are also safer because the liquid inside of the batteries is flammable, they are also expected to perform a lot better, companies expect solid-state batteries to be cheaper to produce, much smaller, and higher energy density, some saying that it is possible to get a jump of three times the energy density of Lithium-Ion batteries. One of the companies leading the charge is Sakti 3 which is a company by Dyson that is aiming to make a battery that will power Dyson’s future electric cars. There are also many new inventions such as an all-terrain robot that will aid with natural disaster relief, however, the battery only lasts for ninety minutes, far to little time to be effective in the field. Solid-state batteries would not only change the domestic market, but also the commercial energy market. Energy storage has been an issue in the past while using intermittent renewable energy storage such as wind and solar energy, there have been plans to build large swaths of batteries, however, this is would be impractical near a large city where space is at a premium, solid-state batteries promise to be much smaller and cheaper, this could provide us with the opportunity to switch to a fully renewable energy source without the worry of running out of power in the middle of the night.
