Liquid batteries could level the load: Progress toward goal of inexpensive grid-scale batteries

MIT News
Feb 14, 2012

Professor Donald Sadoway and Materials Processing Center Research Affiliate David Bradwell observe one of their small test batteries in the lab. The battery itself is inside the heavily insulated metal cylinder at center, which heats it to 700 degrees Celsius. Photo: Patrick Gillooly

The biggest drawback to many real or proposed sources of clean, renewable energy is their intermittency: The wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine, and so the power they produce may not be available at the times it’s needed. A major goal of energy research has been to find ways to help smooth out these erratic supplies.

New results from an ongoing research program at MIT, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, show a promising technology that could provide that long-sought way of leveling the load — at far lower cost and with greater longevity than previous methods. The system uses high-temperature batteries whose liquid components, like some novelty cocktails, naturally settle into distinct layers because of their different densities.

The three molten materials form the positive and negative poles of the battery, as well as a layer of electrolyte — a material that charged particles cross through as the battery is being charged or discharged — in between. All three layers are composed of materials that are abundant and inexpensive, explains Donald Sadoway, the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the new paper.

“We explored many chemistries,” Sadoway says, looking for the right combination of electrical properties, abundant availability and differences in density that would allow the layers to remain separate. His team has found a number of promising candidates, he says, and is publishing their detailed analysis of one such combination: magnesium for the negative electrode (top layer), a salt mixture containing magnesium chloride for the electrolyte (middle layer) and antimony for the positive electrode (bottom layer). The system would operate at a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius, or 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit.

In this formulation, Sadoway explains, the battery delivers current as magnesium atoms lose two electrons, becoming magnesium ions that migrate through the electrolyte to the other electrode. There, they reacquire two electrons and revert to ordinary magnesium atoms, which form an alloy with the antimony. To recharge, the battery is connected to a source of electricity, which drives magnesium out of the alloy and across the electrolyte, where it then rejoins the negative electrode.

The inspiration for the concept came from Sadoway’s earlier work on the electrochemistry of aluminum smelting, which is conducted in electrochemical cells that operate at similarly high temperatures. Many decades of operation have proved that such systems can operate reliably over long periods of time at an industrial scale, producing metal at very low cost. In effect, he says, what he figured out was “a way to run the smelter in reverse.”
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